28th January 2004, 3:39 PM
Quote:4. That he did try to call our bluff justified the war. There is no reason we should assume the best from a murderous madman who has used the things against his enemies before.
He did? No, I would say he did everything he could to satisfy us in the last few months (within the limits of what his mind would allow) -- allowed in inspectors, let them go anywhere, and started destroying those missiles that had a range longer than the rules allowed... yes before that he resisted, but once we put the question to him "will you allow in inspectors?" with UN support, he said "Yes". I think that this greatly surprised the Bush Administration as I'm pretty sure they were expecting him to refuse and for them to use that as their excuse for war. But he accepted, so they had to come up with something else... and it was that he was hiding his weapons from the inspectors and wasn't telling the truth.
Well now we know that (in 2003, on this issue) he was. Oops.
Quote:3. The WMD is gone now. This raises one of two questions the liberal media ignore: "What happened to them, who has them now?" and "Why did Saddam try to bluff us if he really didn't have any"? Instead, they use it as a banner to rally against President Bush.
First, he (and/or his scientists) never restarted his WMD program after the Gulf War to any significant degree becuase he was scared of it being caught by the inspections the UN had set up. Also, the UN sanctions were quite effective in keeping him from banned materials. This too surprised Bush -- they thought that the sanctions weren't working and Sadaam could get whatever he wanted and that the inspections were a joke, and that the UN was worthless. Actually going into Iraq has proved him wrong, and decisively. But Bush will never really admit that the UN is useful... he'll take half steps like allowing their team in to assess elections (becuase he has to, really), but admit that he was wrong? He'll never do that. Old Europe and all that.
Oh, and Sadaam got rid of his weapons over the 12 years since the first war slowly... but without a new program, and with inspectors there until '98 looking, he could only do so much. And if you forget those inspectors were pretty successful in finding a lot of stuff. As for 2002, when the inspectors returned I think, in the interim years everyone seems to have thought that he'd rebuild... but evidently the sanctions worked, and fear of future inspections had a hold... oh, and Clinton's 1998 bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities hurt a lot too. Certainly after that they didn't make any new bio or chem weapons.
Why did they act so secretive when openness would show they had nothing? Well they were open as much as Sadaam's pride would allow... but he hates us and would never just allow us in to do as we please... and also I do think that he thought he had weapons, and that his scientists were tricking him with made up programs and the like to satisfy him that they were working on weapons when actually they were not for various reasons.
There was also an interesting report I read recently that said that while no Republican Guard troops had chem or bio weapons, a lot of the commanders said "we don't, but other Guard troops do"... so clearly many in the Iraqi army thought they had weapons. I think Sadaam thought they had something. Not much, but something, and that kept him from being fully open... but his hatred for America would be a bigger factor I think. He would be uncorroporative just because of spite, surely. Oh, and he DID let in the inspectors, and he DID let them in to all the facilities, and he DID start destroying those missiles, so you are somewhat off base there...
As for what happened to them, I think that they either destroyed them in the desert somewhere or buried them in the desert somewhere. Probably destroyed.
Quote:1. We know he did have them. We know he used them on the Kurds.
Yes, in the '80s and maybe early '90s before the sanctions and inspections, he did have banned weapons. But the US knew. We helped him get it after all, in the Reagan administration and before! We knew he was gassing Kurds and Iranians, but since they were stopping the even-more-hated Iranians, any amount of evil was allowed the Iraqis... Sadaam went into Kuwait because he thought that just like with Iran we wouldn't react. He was shocked to see us react to what he did because of how we'd allowed anything in the Iran war... (remember the pic of Rumdsfeld shaking Sadaam's hand?)
Quote:2. Liberals love making this out to be some elaborate Bush deception. Why then, if he wanted to start a war and he knew Iraq didn't have the weapons he said they did, did he not plant them? How easy that would have been. Obviously, if there is a willful deception, it is not based in the White House. Bill Clinton also knew Iraq had WMD. He said as much on more than one occasion while he was president. So did Wesley Clark .
This is a good question. You are right, Clinton thought he had stuff. And when the inspections started he indisputably did. But they found a lot, and he got rid of more so they couldn't find it, and his production never really started up again... and the thing with the defector (Sadaam's relative who fled to Jordan, gave some intel, was lured back later, and killed by Sadaam) also convinced him to get rid of stuff. And then of course in '98 we rocketted some of his production. But after that... yeah, the Clinton administration and the CIA evidently still thought he had stuff when he didn't.
I highly recommend this article, it says a lot of what I would here, but in greater detail, about how the CIA missed cues... fine I'll post it, you won't bother...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/intern...AY.html?hp
Quote:Ex-Inspector Says C.I.A. Missed Disarray in Iraqi Arms Program
By JAMES RISEN
Published: January 26, 2004
ASHINGTON, Jan. 25 — American intelligence agencies failed to detect that Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were in a state of disarray in recent years under the increasingly erratic leadership of Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A.`s former chief weapons inspector said in an interview late Saturday.
The inspector, David A. Kay, who led the government's efforts to find evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs until he resigned on Friday, said the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did not realize that Iraqi scientists had presented ambitious but fanciful weapons programs to Mr. Hussein and had then used the money for other purposes.
Dr. Kay also reported that Iraq attempted to revive its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001, but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya did.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general, Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991.
From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.
After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
"The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Dr. Kay said. "The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs."
In interviews after he was captured, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told Dr. Kay that Mr. Hussein had become increasingly divorced from reality during the last two years of his rule. Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition was gearing up for war, Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence assessments were so grave that he would recommend that the Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations overhaul their intelligence collection and analytical efforts.
Dr. Kay said analysts had come to him, "almost in tears, saying they felt so badly that we weren't finding what they had thought we were going to find — I have had analysts apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they did."
In response to Dr. Kay's comments, an intelligence official said Sunday that while some prewar assessments may have been wrong, "it is premature to say that the intelligence community's judgments were completely wrong or largely wrong — there are still a lot of answers we need." The official added, however, that the C.I.A. had already begun an internal review to determine whether its analytical processes were sound.
Dr. Kay said that based on his team's interviews with Iraqi scientists, reviews of Iraqi documents and examinations of facilities and other materials, the administration was also almost certainly wrong in its prewar belief that Iraq had any significant stockpiles of illicit weapons.
"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," Dr. Kay said. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on.
"I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990's. Somewhere in the mid-1990's, the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated."
Quote:(Page 2 of 4)
While it is possible Iraq kept developing "test amounts" of chemical weapons and was working on improved methods of production, he said, the evidence is strong that "they did not produce large amounts of chemical weapons throughout the 1990's."
Regarding biological weapons, he said there was evidence that the Iraqis continued research and development "right up until the end" to improve their ability to produce ricin. "They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization," Dr. Kay said. "They were maintaining an infrastructure, but they didn't have large-scale production under way."
He added that Iraq did make an effort to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but that the evidence suggested that the program was rudimentary at best and would have taken years to rebuild, after being largely abandoned in the 1990's. "There was a restart of the nuclear program," he said. "But the surprising thing is that if you compare it to what we now know about Iran and Libya, the Iraqi program was never as advanced," Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said Iraq had also maintained an active ballistic missile program that was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the American invasion. He said it appeared that money was put back into the nuclear weapons program to restart the effort in part because the Iraqis realized they needed some kind of payload for their new rockets.
While he urged that the hunt should continue in Iraq, he said he believed "85 percent of the significant things" have already been uncovered, and cautioned that severe looting in Iraq after Mr. Hussein was toppled in April had led to the loss of many crucial documents and other materials. That means it will be virtually impossible to ever get a complete picture of what Iraq was up to before the war, he added.
"There is going to be an irreducible level of ambiguity because of all the looting," Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said he believed that Iraq was a danger to the world, but not the same threat that the Bush administration publicly detailed.
"We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq," he said. "And now we know that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country — and no central control."
C.I.A. Missed Signs of Chaos
But Dr. Kay said the C.I.A. missed the significance of the chaos in the leadership and had no idea how badly that chaos had corrupted Iraq's weapons capabilities or the threat it raised of loose scientific knowledge being handed over to terrorists. "The system became so corrupt, and we missed that," he said.
He said it now appeared that Iraq had abandoned the production of illicit weapons and largely eliminated its stockpiles in the 1990's in large part because of Baghdad's concerns about the United Nations weapons inspection process. He said Iraqi scientists and documents show that Baghdad was far more concerned about United Nations inspections than Washington had ever realized.
"The Iraqis say that they believed that Unscom was more effective, and they didn't want to get caught," Dr. Kay said, using an acronym for the inspection program, the United Nations Special Commission.
The Iraqis also feared the disclosures that would come from the 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, who had helped run the weapons programs. Dr. Kay said one Iraqi document that had been found showed the extent to which the Iraqis believed that Mr. Kamel's defection would hamper any efforts to continue weapons programs.
In addition, Dr. Kay said, it is now clear that an American bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998 destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in chemical weapons programs.
Dr. Kay said his team had uncovered no evidence that Niger had tried to sell uranium to Iraq for its nuclear weapons program. In his State of the Union address in 2003, President Bush reported that British intelligence had determined that Iraq was trying to import uranium from an African nation, and Niger's name was later put forward.
Quote:(Page 3 of 4)
"We found nothing on Niger," Dr. Kay said. He added that there was evidence that someone did approach the Iraqis claiming to be able to sell uranium and diamonds from another African country, but apparently nothing came of the approach. The original reports on Niger have been found to be based on forged documents, and the Bush administration has since backed away from its initial assertions.
Dr. Kay added that there was now a consensus within the United States intelligence community that mobile trailers found in Iraq and initially thought to be laboratories for biological weapons were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel. While using the trailers for such purposes seems bizarre, Dr. Kay said, "Iraq was doing a lot of nonsensical things" under Mr. Hussein.
The intelligence reports that Iraq was poised to use chemical weapons against invading troops were false, apparently based on faulty reports and Iraqi disinformation, Dr. Kay said.
When American troops found that Iraqi troops had stored defensive chemical-weapons suits and antidotes, Washington assumed the Iraqi military was poised to use chemicals against American forces. But interviews with Iraqi military officers and others have shown that the Iraqis kept the gear because they feared Israel would join an American-led invasion and use chemical weapons against them.
Role of Republican Guards
Dr. Kay said interviews with senior officers of the Special Republican Guards, Mr. Hussein's most elite units, had suggested that prewar intelligence reports were wrong in warning that these units had chemical weapons and would use them against American forces as they closed in on Baghdad.
The former Iraqi officers reported that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons, he said. But all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons.
"They all said they didn't have it, but they thought other units had it," Dr. Kay said. He said it appeared they were the victims of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mr. Hussein.
Dr. Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any unconventional weapons to Syria, as some Bush administration officials have suggested. He said there had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying they or someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the border, but there is no proof that such movements involved weapons materials.
Dr. Kay said the basic problem with the way the C.I.A. tried to gauge Iraq's weapons programs is now painfully clear: for five years, the agency lacked its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information.
During the 1990's, Dr. Kay said, the agency became spoiled by on-the-ground intelligence that it obtained from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998.
"Unscom was like crack cocaine for the C.I.A.," Dr. Kay said. "They could see something from a satellite or other technical intelligence, and then direct the inspectors to go look at it."
The agency became far too dependent on spy satellites, intercepted communications and intelligence developed by foreign spies and by defectors and exiles, Dr. Kay said. While he said the agency analysts who were monitoring Iraq's weapons programs did the best they could with what they had, he argued that the agency failed to make it clear to American policy makers that their assessments were increasingly based on very limited information.
"I think that the system should have a way for an analyst to say, `I don't have enough information to make a judgment,' " Dr. Kay said. "There is really not a way to do that under the current system."
He added that while the analysts included caveats on their reports, those passages "tended to drop off as the reports would go up the food chain" inside the government.
As a result, virtually everyone in the United States intelligence community during both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations thought Iraq still had the illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim of its own certainty.
Quote:(Page 4 of 4)
"Alarm bells should have gone off when everyone believes the same thing," Dr. Kay said. "No one stood up and said, `Let's examine the footings for these conclusions.' I think you ought to have a place for contrarian views in the system."
Finds No Pressure From Bush
Dr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda on Iraq.
Last year, some C.I.A. analysts said they had felt pressed to find links between Iraq and Al Qaeda to suit the administration. While Dr. Kay said he has no knowledge about that issue, he did not believe that pressure was placed on analysts regarding the weapons programs.
"All the analysts I have talked to said they never felt pressured on W.M.D.," he said. "Everyone believed that they had W.M.D."
Dr. Kay also said he never felt pressed by the Bush administration to shape his own reports on the status of Iraq's weapons. He said that in a White House meeting with Mr. Bush last August, the president urged him to uncover what really happened.
"The only comment I ever had from the president was to find the truth," Dr. Kay said. "I never got any pressure to find a certain outcome."
Dr. Kay, a former United Nations inspector who was brought in last summer to run the Iraq Survey Group by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said he resigned his post largely because he disagreed with the decision in November by the administration and the Pentagon to shift intelligence resources from the hunt for banned weapons to counterinsurgency efforts inside Iraq. Dr. Kay is being succeeded by Charles A. Duelfer, another former United Nations inspector, who has also expressed skepticism about whether the United States will find any chemical or biological weapons.
Dr. Kay said the decision to shift resources away from the weapons hunt came at a time of "near panic" among American officials in Baghdad because of rising casualties caused by bombings and ambushes of American troops.
He added that the decision ran counter to written assurances he had been given when he took the job, and that the shift in resources had severely hampered the weapons hunt.
He said that there is only a limited amount of time left to conduct a thorough search before a new Iraqi government takes over in the summer, and that there are already signs of resistance to the work by Iraqi government officials.