Politics: A new beginning

[Gattigap]

This month's Atlantic has an interview with David Pollack, who shares his theories about where the fuck the WMDs went.

Pollack is a good source to ask, as (a) he wrote the book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, which became the neocon's bible for justifying the war, (b) he was a CIA analyst and NSC member, so I imagine he speaks with some authority, and (c) the interview contains (relatively) little screaming at liberals or conservatives.

That said, there're ample pebbles for us to pick up and throw at each other. The article is long, but I've excerpted and color coded some portions of it with our handy-dandy political ammunition coloring scheme. As I read it, Pollack's points are:

1. Everyone (including the Clintonistas, and the intelligence community generally) thought prior to the war that Saddam had WMDs in some form. Even the doubters at UNSCOM were converted in the mid-90s.

I can't think of anyone who did not believe that the Iraqis had a weapons of mass destruction program. There was simply no one.

The Iraqis did still have the programs. All of that came out in the 1995-1996 time frame, when Hussein Kamel defected and there were a series of other revelations where UNSCOM and foreign-intelligence services caught the Iraqis red-handed with SCUD production facilities, a complete biological production facility, all kinds of illegal trades and transactions, and purchases abroad. After this, the inspectors realized how completely wrong they had been—like the saying "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." They really thought they had disarmed the Iraqis. They wanted to transition the files and were actually saying nasty things about the U.S. having an obsession with the Iraqis. After 1995-1996, the inspectors turned 180 degrees. From then on, they too were absolutely convinced that Saddam would stop at nothing to acquire the weapons. They were convinced they had an enormous problem—a problem that would probably never go away as long as Saddam Hussein was in power.

2. In retrospect, the author’s theory is that in 1996, when Saddam’s son in law defected, Iraq freaked out, destroyed some stuff, and made everything else dormant. Before getting kicked out, the inspectors (with tips from the intelligence community) was too good at finding stuff, and keeping up the program was extending sanctions, which Saddam wanted to have end. Perhaps if he kept it dormant, he could restart it once sanctions were dropped.

3. After the UN inspectors got kicked out around 1996, intelligence capabilities dropped to about zero, everyone worked under the assumption that Saddam had to be proceeding with the program, and about the only intel we had was from defectors (whose testimony couldn’t be confirmed, and who, it now appears, lied.)

Iraq was an extremely difficult environment for any foreign intelligence agency to operate in. Iraq was a closed, totalitarian society. Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi expatriate, had the wonderful phrase, the Republic of Fear. Saddam had created a Stalinist, self-policing society, where the people were so terrified that every word they uttered was being heard by some Iraqi authority that they just wouldn't say anything.

Foreigners in Iraq were tailed and harassed. In the United States or other parts of the world, they want to keep tabs on those they believe are foreign intelligences operators. But, they do it surreptitiously. In Iraq, it was very clear—you had someone walking fifty feet behind you at all times. If you did anything the Iraqis didn't like, they started harassing you. They'd throw you out of the country, they'd beat you up, they'd break into your home. They would make it very clear that if you kept doing things they didn't want, you could pay a very heavy price for it. They tapped all of the outgoing phone lines and tried to keep tabs on all the communication going into and out of Iraq.

They had an enormous network of informers throughout the country. Most Iraqis believe that in a country of 24 million people, 2 to 4 million of those people were on the payroll of various government organizations. Whether it was true or not doesn't matter. All that mattered was that the Iraqis believed it. They assumed that one out of every four or five people they knew was reporting for the government. In this kind of environment, it is almost impossible for case officers to operate, to recruit Iraqis, to gather information on this society and especially to meet with sensitive personnel. The idea that an Iraqi government official or a scientist would meet with someone connected to the Americans was unheard of. That made it extraordinarily difficult for the United States or any other country to maintain a network of spies inside of Iraq. As a result, there was very little human intelligence that was forthcoming out of Iraq.

The CIA and other intelligence agencies devoted tremendous assets to Iraq. It was an extremely high priority, with a real emphasis on trying to collect against Iraq. But it was an extraordinarily difficult target. I think no matter what level of effort we put against it, it was going to be extremely hard.

That said, there are always more resources that can be devoted to a problem. Think about two examples, the first being the Soviet Union. Like Iraq, the Soviet Union was an extremely hard target. Yet the United States turned itself inside out to try to find out what was going on there. We had far more failures than successes, but I think arguably we had better collection against the Soviet Union than we did against Saddam's Iraq.

The second example is terrorism. Before September 11, the United States had a tremendous intelligence effort against terrorism. It was one of our highest priorities, with all kinds of people working on it and huge resources being lavished on it. After September 11, the resources that were lavished on terrorism were expanded exponentially. There are always greater levels you can go to if something is that high a priority. In retrospect, we may have wanted to put even great resources against Iraq. It's hard to fault the U.S. intelligence community for devoting the percentage of its assets that it did, but we might have asked the question, Are we devoting enough to intelligence in general?

4. BUT – even given all of that, he thinks many in the Bush Administration consciously misled the American people about how imminent the threat really was.

There are certain members of the Administration who did a disservice to the American people. I don't want to fault the entire Administration, because I think there were a lot of people in the Administration who were saying things that were completely true and what they were doing was completely above-board. But there were others in the Administration who really weren't.

The thing that upset and disappointed me the most was that there were some Administration officials, and particularly some high Administration officials, who were making statements that weren't the whole truth. The one thing for which I can find no excuse is this question of not telling the American people the whole truth. The nuclear issue is the most important example of this. The judgment of the intelligence community, expressed in a number of written documents, some of which have been made public, was that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons programs and that he could possibly acquire a nuclear weapon in one to two years if he managed to get fissile material on the black market. The intelligence community felt that it was much more likely that he would not be able to acquire a nuclear weapon for five to seven years. In making the case for war, a number of high-level officials in the Administration stressed the one-to-two year figure, which made the threat from Iraq seem imminent. The intelligence community couldn't rule it out, but the best judgment was that it was a more distant threat.

I think the Administration was only telling part of the truth to the American people because it was trying to justify a war in 2003. The intelligence estimates just didn't really support that imminence. The Administration could have said, "Look, the intelligence community thinks it may be five to seven years away, but they do think it's also possible that they could get it in one to two years. After 9/11, we shouldn't take even that kind of a risk." I think that would have been a much more honest way of presenting it to the American people.