Iraq's WMD

Today's UK Telegraph has a very good article by the noted military historian John Keegan.

Mr Keegan notes that even perfect intelligence doesn't guarantee a victory against even a weaker force, then relates various successes and failures during WW-II and how the British intelligence service's conclusions about Germany's rocket programs was completely wrong until the missiles started landing. In short, intelligence is an iffy business, and especially so when you don't have any assets on the ground. All we had to go on in Iraq was a decade of signals intercepts and defectors.

Little or nothing about the past, even about such a well-known episode as the V-weapons, has influenced those who have so violently denounced the Government over the so-called September dossier. Its critics have taken the view throughout that intelligence can and ought to be perfect, and that the editing of the dossier's contents amounted to systematic falsification. Not only does that attitude reveal the critics' complete ignorance of how intelligence is collected and assessed, it also suggests that they have not bothered to read the dossier, included complete in the Hutton report.

Well the critics have no problems with revealing their complete ignorance, as they prance around saying "No blood for oil!" like they have for every war of the past 60 years. WW-II? Oil. Vietnam? Oil. Afghanistan (which only pumps 300 barrels a day)? Oil pipeline. Getting back to the British intelligence dossier, Keegan continues.

Only in Chapter 3 of Part I does it include false information - that Iraq had procured nuclear material from an African country - and claims about Iraqi capabilities, such as the range of some missiles, that are exaggerated. As to the first, that seems simply a mistake, based on what is now known to be a forged document; at least one mistake in a large intelligence assessment might be expected. The exaggerations are regrettable, but assessment is inherently relative. Intelligence officers deal in a balance of probabilities and must sometimes err on the wrong side.

That's nothing compared to failures in US intelligence that confused the high-speed MIG-25 with a long range cruise missile test, leading us to conclude that the MIG-25 was both fast and long ranged. Fears of this non-existent super fighter led to the development of the F-15. Kennedy ran on the missile gap (false), and this after the non-existent bomber gap. The CIA intelligence about the Soviet Union was in some ways so lacking that they didn’t even foresee its collapse. More disturbing than overestimating the status of Iraq's programs is the now apparent underestimation of the programs of Iran and Libya.

Above all, it must be remembered that British intelligence was attempting to penetrate the mentality of a man and a regime which were not wholly rational. It now seems probable that most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the early 1990s, either by the first UN inspection team (UNSCOM) or as a precautionary measure on Saddam's own orders. Saddam was, however, unwilling to admit to such a loss of power, because of the prestige his possession of WMD brought him in the region. His policy of disposing of his WMD while refusing to admit the disposal was completely illogical.

That didn't make sense to anyone, much less those who claimed he didn't have WMD, when even he refused to indicate that he didn't. Thus the many cries from the anti-war crowd that if we attacked he'd use his WMD against us and cause a regional catastrophe. As has been said, not only did every intelligence agency in the world think he had WMD, many concluded that even Saddam thought he had WMD. It would be somewhat more disturbing if we'd reached a different conclusion from everyone else on the basis of essentially the same set of raw data.

Finally, what purpose would be served by a further assessment of the dossier? Any inquiry would shortly resolve into a semantic argument about the nature of text editing: a sentence here, a phrase there. It is supremely ironic that the BBC is demanding such a semantic argument, when the trouble it has got itself into was caused precisely by its failure to undertake any sort of editing at all of an unscripted text by a reporter with a less than perfect reputation for reliability.

Are nuanced looks at intelligence data, where various claims are weighed along with the possible motivations and reliability of the informants, to be looked at by journalists who normally just make things up to fit a running story line? After all, these were the people who reported on a sandstorm while talking "quagmire" and "retreat" with a straight face. The number of outright falsehoods the BBC has run has been simply astounding, from the simple mislabeling of various weapons out of ignorance of military matters to the more elaborate claims that we were raining tens of thousands of pounds of depeleted uranium bombs on Iraq, despite the fact that there is no such thing as a depleted uranium bomb. Of course, they also report that Bush held up a plastic turkey in Iraq, despite the fact that there is no such thing as a plastic turkey. If there should be an investigation into claims of non-existant weapons and specialized materials, perhaps it should focus on our non-existant DU bombs and plastic turkeys, and how reporters could assume that such things existed.