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CIA: Sinned against or
sinning?
By Andrew F Tully
WASHINGTON - The US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) is reportedly reviewing the intelligence on Iraq
that was gathered before the recent war to evaluate its
accuracy. The CIA will examine its own intelligence as
well as material gathered by the Defense Intelligence
Agency and the National Security Agency, among other
government entities.
The review was not ordered
because of suspicions that the intelligence was
inadequate, but simply to determine how it compares with
what is actually being found in Iraq now that US-led
forces control the country. However, a New York Times
article reports that some intelligence analysts who
support the review believe that the intelligence may
have been politicized to support assertions by the
administration of US President George W Bush that Iraq's
leader, Saddam Hussein, illegally possessed biological
and chemical weapons.
If the prewar intelligence
does not adequately support that thesis, the legitimacy
of the US war to depose Saddam could come into question.
That's according to retired General Edward Atkeson, who
once served as the deputy chief of staff for
intelligence for the US Army in Europe. "It's becoming
quite apparent that [illegal weapons are] not what the
war was fought about. It was just the facade excuse that
the [Bush] administration used," he told RFE/RL.
Atkeson said that he supports the belief held by
some that the current US administration - particularly
senior members of the Defense Department - have long
wanted an excuse to depose Saddam because they saw him
as an impediment to normalizing relations between Middle
Eastern countries and the West.
"A very small
coterie within the Pentagon thinks that you've got a bad
guy sitting in Baghdad and that he's causing all kinds
of problems, things that are interfering with our
expectation of having a happy relationship with the
people of the Middle East. And so we've got to find a
way to get him. Now, how can we make that acceptable to
the people at large? Do we have reports they have
weapons of mass destruction? Yeah, we do," Atkeson said.
Atkeson said that the trouble with the
intelligence used to support the belief that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction is that it is not always the
best available. According to Atkeson, political leaders
usually are extremely selective about what intelligence
they choose to support their policies. Often, he said,
they ignore larger bodies of evidence that might support
an opposing view.
"Policy always has to dominate
intelligence because ultimately that decides what a
nation is going to do. If there's a little bit of
information in favor of one policy that the policy maker
favors, he's going to use that little bit of information
that supports it," he said.
Anthony Cordesman
strongly disagrees. He is a military and foreign policy
analyst at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, a private policy-research institute in
Washington. Cordesman told RFE/RL that he believes the
war against Iraq was not based solely on whether Iraq
was developing outlawed weapons. He said Saddam already
was violating the terms of the ceasefire that ended
hostilities in the 1991 Gulf War by importing equipment
to make the weapons, not disclosing its research and
development efforts, and not accounting for any
destruction of its weapons.
Cordesman also
supports the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam
flouted the strict terms of Security Council Resolution
1441. He notes that it called for immediate and complete
cooperation with UN weapons inspectors. As a result, he
said, the US was justified in imposing what the
resolution calls "serious consequences" on the Iraqi
government.
According to Cordesman, UN weapons
inspectors established that Saddam was developing
illegal weapons by finding trace evidence of the
programs and exposing the al-Sumud missiles that Iraq
was illegally manufacturing.
The real issue,
Cordesman said, is whether the US and Britain
erroneously concluded from UN findings that Iraq was
developing illicit weapons for immediate deployment. "It
seems that Iraq was caught, when the war began, at a
point where it had shifted to a strategy of destroying
many of its weapons, of concealing its efforts -
dispersing them, putting them into small areas which
could not be tied to the ones that UNSCOM [UN weapons
inspectors] had found [between 1991 and 1998] - and that
its strategy was not to have a major war-fighting
capability ready when the war began," he said.
Cordesman said that it may be a long time before
the US and Britain find out the nature of Saddam's
weapons programs, and that what they do find may
surprise them. For example, he said, the Iraqi
government may even have suspended such programs while
the government came under scrutiny. Saddam, Cordesman
said, must have calculated that he could always resume
his weapons programs once the world's attention shifted
away from Iraq and the UN grew weary of continuing to
impose sanctions on his country.
"As we
gradually sort our way through the records we've picked
up [in Iraq], we're going to see that Iraq did continue
to proliferate [weapons], but the strategy may have been
a different one [from what the Americans and British
expected]. It may have been preserving cells of research
and development capability and of buying dual-use
facilities and equipment that could be converted after
sanctions were lifted to the rapid production of these
weapons," Cordesman said.
Further, Cordesman
said the war was justified even if no further evidence
of illegal weapons is found. He cited the brutality of
Saddam's rule: "If we have not found chemical and
biological weapons, we did find missiles in violation
[of the ceasefire], and we did find mass graves. And one
of the most key legitimate reasons for this war was you
were dealing with a tyranny which not only threatened
the region but actively threatened the Iraqi people. And
in that sense, the discovery of mass graves in at least
three locations is perhaps legitimacy enough."
Atkeson, however, said that this was not a valid
reason to go to war because the extent of Saddam's
cruelty and the existence of the graves was not known
beforehand. Given US forces' failure so far to find any
illegal weapons, he said that the discovery of the
graves after the war merely allows the Bush
administration to justify the war after the fact by
making it seem "righteous".
Copyright (c)
2002, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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