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New
York Times - 8 June 2003 - TODAY'S EDITORIALS
Was the Intelligence Cooked?
The latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether
Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. American
troops may not have uncovered any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Bush
administration was warning about, the argument goes. But they have found plenty of proof
that Iraq suffered under a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens or
hundreds of thousands of his own people, and that is reason enough to justify the
invasion. We disagree. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from
power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush
administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The good word of the United
States is too central to America's leadership abroad — and to President Bush's
dubious doctrine of pre-emptive warfare — to be treated so cavalierly.
Like most Americans, we believed the government's repeated warnings that Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction threatened the security of the world. The urgent need to disarm Saddam
Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to
see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons
programs under control.
It would still be premature to conclude that Iraq abandoned its efforts to manufacture and
stockpile unconventional arms after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. But after weeks of
futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with
horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to
frontline Iraqi forces.
America's intelligence agencies betrayed little doubt about the Iraqi threat last October
when they produced a comprehensive assessment of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. A
declassified version, while noting that Iraq was hiding large portions of its weapons
programs, flatly stated: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as
missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will
have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The question today is whether that and
other assessments were sound or were influenced by a desire to tailor intelligence
findings to policy prescriptions.
By their nature, intelligence reports, in the absence of a smoking gun, are subjective
exercises based on ambiguous information that is open to differing interpretations. In the
case of Iraq, Washington relied largely on circumstantial data rather than spy satellite
photographs or intercepted phone calls that would have proved and pinpointed the existence
of unconventional weapons. But given the failure so far to find a single weapon of mass
destruction, it is fair to wonder if intelligence analysts might have misread the
available data, played down ambiguities or even pushed their findings too far to stay
square with Bush policy on Iraq. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has
said that the C.I.A.'s work was not compromised by politics.
These matters are properly being examined by Congressional committees and a White House
advisory board on intelligence practices, as well as by the Central Intelligence Agency
itself. It is also reasonable to ask if the administration's fixation on Iraq influenced
the way intelligence reports were used by top officials intent on making the case for war.
Careful attention should be given to examining the work of a separate Pentagon unit that
was created after Sept. 11 to search for terrorist links with Iraq.
The issue goes to the heart of American leadership. Mr. Bush's belief that the United
States has the right to use force against nations that it believes may threaten American
security is based on the assumption that Washington can make accurate judgments about how
serious such a danger is. If the intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the
United States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the ability to rally
the world, and the American people, to the defense of the country when real threats
materialize.
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