Middle School Playground

[NovoMira]

Yes, Pete.....It is an imperfect business ...to say the least.

Intelligence problems rattle foundations of Bush foreign policy
By Bob Deans
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Sunday, February 15, 2004

WASHINGTON -- An imperfect business in a dangerous world. That's how CIA Director George Tenet described U.S. intelligence gathering recently in conceding broad gaps in the agency's understanding of the weapons threat posed by pre-war Iraq.

As a half-dozen inquiries try to figure out what went wrong, the intelligence failings have raised vexing new questions about a controversial piece of the Bush administration's defense doctrine: the issue of when and how to wage preemptive war.

The case for attacking a country that hasn't struck first, after all, is only as strong as the intelligence that undergirds it. And, as the U.S. experience regarding Saddam Hussein's former regime has shown, intelligence work remains as much an art as a science, an excrutiatingly difficult craft where ambiguity rules.

"By definition, intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden," Tenet said in a Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University. "In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right."

As President Bush prepared the nation for war with Iraq, the intelligence community's best estimate was that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons. Some may yet turn up, as Bush and other administration officials insist. The raw materials for a biological weapons program could fit into a single tractor-trailer, not an impossible thing to hide in the vast deserts of Iraq.

After 10 months of searching, though, some 1,400 inspectors have yet to discover any significant stockpiles of illicit arms. On Thursday in an interview with The Associated Press, former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay advised Bush to acknowledge he was wrong about Iraq weapons. Clinging to the hope that weapons of mass destruction may be found, Kay said, only hampers efforts to improve intelligence.

"My only serious regret about the continued holding on to the hope that eventually we'll find it is that it eventually allows you to avoid the hard steps necessary to reform the process," said Kay, who has said repeatedly since resigning last month that U.S. intelligence was wrong in claiming that Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. pre-war assessment, however, was shared by most of the world. Even opponents of the war in Iraq, such as France and Germany, suspected that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, though they disagreed with the Bush administration about the urgency of the threat. The international debate centered on whether to go to war to find the weapons or allow United Nations inspections, backed by military force if necessary, to ferret them out.

Nor was the judgment of the Congress ignored. Both the House and Senate passed, by large majorities, a joint resolution authorizing the use of military force to disarm Saddam five months before Bush launched the war.

"It turns out we were all wrong, probably," Kay told a congressional panel late last month, "and that is most disturbing."


U.S. credibility suffers


Some analysts see in the situation a cautionary tale about the peril of basing war on intelligence findings.

"You had not just the U.S. intelligence fail, but probably three of the best intelligence agencies in the world -- the United States, the British and the Israelis," said Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and co-author of the Washington think tank's recently released report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications."

"That is what guided in part the decision to go to war," she said, "and we have seen the consequences of doing that."

In the era of global terrorism, however, others argue that to act only when near-perfect intelligence can be assured could put the country at risk.

"In our vulnerable world, to wait until compelling evidence of a threat is leisurely compiled is to wait for our destruction, to err on the side of annihilation," said Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee.

For now at least, the faulty pre-war intelligence on Iraq has shot holes through the administration's central justification for war with Iraq. While Bush talks frequently about freeing Iraqis from Saddam's brutal dictatorship and paving the way for a democratic Iraq, he led the country to war over the threat that Baghdad might help terrorists get their hands on a doomsday weapon to unleash against Americans.

"We went into this war under false premises," Rep. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said. Many of the same administration officials now quick to point out the fallability of intelligence estimates were expressing no such uncertainty in the lead-up to war, said Menendez, but were instead speaking emphatically about the charges "in ways that turned threats from minor to dire."

In some quarters, at least, the gap between the threat as billed and the findings on the ground has also taken a toll on U.S. credibility around the world.

"There has been some damage -- damage that will probably take some time to heal," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said earlier this month.

That could sound discordant echoes as Bush presses his nonproliferation agenda with countries such as Iran and North Korea.

"People are going to be very suspicious when one talks to them about intelligence," Annan said. "And they are going to be very suspicious when we try to use intelligence to justify certain actions."

More fundamentally, the apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has exposed Bush to a haunting election-year question: Was the war really necessary?

"We've got our armed forces bogged down in the wrong war, a war we didn't have to fight," retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark said last week as he ended his presidential candidacy.

Certainly Bush disagrees.

The Iraq conflict was "a war of necessity," he told NBC last week, saying "we had no choice" but to topple Saddam, who used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in Iraq and Iranian soldiers on several occasions in the 1980s.

Bush factored that history into his evaluation of the weapons intelligence, against the backdrop of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on this country.

"The worst nightmare scenario for any president is to realize that these kind of terrorist networks have the capacity to arm up with some of these deadly weapons, and they strike us," Bush said. "The man was a threat. And we dealt with him."


Pre-emptive strike?

Pre-emption itself is nothing new.

For centuries, nations have relied on pre-emptive military strikes to protect themselves from enemies that mobilize troops or otherwise array forces against them. No leader anywhere is obliged to sit back and wait to be attacked before taking steps to defend his country from a clearly imminent threat.

The whole concept of pre-emption was cast in a disturbing new light, however, by Sept. 11. At what point, policymakers asked, did that attack become imminent? And how could anyone have demonstrated that it was?

In the post-Sept. 11 world, Bush decided, not every danger must reach the threshold of "imminent threat" before it justifies pre-emption.

"I believe it is essential that when we see a threat we deal with those threats before they become imminent," Bush told NBC. "It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war."

What, then, is to be the new standard for pre-emptive war?

In Iraq, Bush has provided an answer of sorts. He didn't call Iraq an imminent threat -- Tenet said intelligence analysts never regarded it as such -- though he certainly conveyed an impression of urgency. More precisely, Bush called Iraq "a grave and gathering danger."

If that term sounds nebulous, it wasn't something Bush pulled out of thin air.

One year after Sept. 11, Bush explained his rationale for lowering the threshold for pre-emption.

In the White House National Security Strategy report, Bush stated that there could be times when the United States takes "anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

With anti-American terrorists trying to upgrade their arsenals from boxcutters to nuclear weapons, Bush stated in the report, "the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather."