Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2004, page 19

Special Report

 

The Mystery of Iraq’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction”

 

By Andrew I. Killgore

	Former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, shown at his Jan. 28 appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, got it wrong again when he declared that “we were all wrong.” (AFP photo/Tim Sloan).

PERHAPS GREG Thielmann, retired Department of State officer, got it just right. For the past four years, until his recent retirement, Thielmann worked in the Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (BIR), which provides the secretary of state with intelligence analysis independent of other agencies. The May 30, 2003 New York Times quoted him as saying, “The al-Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S., and the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things.”

Less than a month later, the BIR’s Christian Westermann was quoted in the same paper’s June 24 edition as saying that he had been pressured to tailor his analysis on Iraq to conform with the Bush administration’s views (that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction). Westermann earlier had clashed with John Bolton, the neocon under secretary of state for arms control and international security, over Bolton’s public assertions last year that Cuba had a biological weapons program.

According to the June 25, 2003 New York Times, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), jointly had said that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons. The BIR, however—which had not been consulted by CIA/DIA—advised that it was premature to conclude, as President George W. Bush had done, that the trailers were indeed producing biological weapons. One can infer from the fact that CIA/DIA did not consult BIR on a matter of this importance that the dynamic duo expected that BIR would not agree.

On a recent television program, David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector who recently resigned as the Bush administration’s head hunter for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), described BIR employees as “only” analysts without on-the-ground experience.

It was the BIR, however, that got it right.

The Jan. 10, 2003 New York Times reported that Dr. Mohamed Elbaradei, head of the U.N.’s regulatory International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), disagreed with President Bush when the latter cited Iraq’s attempts to buy special aluminum tubes as proof that Baghdad was “seeking…nuclear bombs.” Elbaradei indicated that he thought Iraq’s claim that it sought the tubes to make rockets was credible.

It would seem, therefore, that Dr. Kay’s recent testimony before Congress that all intelligence services “got it wrong probably” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was incorrect. At the very least, the IAEA and BIR analyses were correct.

Perhaps Bush administration neocons Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary in whose honor the invasion of Iraq is frequently referred to as “Wolfowitz’s War”; Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith; and Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff deserve the most credit for conjuring up WMDs and the war on Iraq. Accompanied by Libby, Cheney himself visited the CIA, most likely to ensure that the CIA went along with the administration’s line that Saddam Hussain had WMD. In a February speech at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, CIA director George Tenet claimed that “nobody told us what to say or how to say it.” That may be literally true, but Cheney’s visits must have been a compelling reminder that the administration wanted a finding that Iraq constituted a danger to the United States.

Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon also worked to promote the myth of Iraqi WMD. He and his fanatical fellow neocons, obsessed with promoting Israel’s interests, built a “hall-of-mirrors” intelligence unit to which they invited such noisome Zionists as the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Ledeen to “cherry pick” intelligence reports. Having the ear and the ideological support of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney, they designed a “made in hell” Iraq.

In their dreams of WMD, the neocons had the enthusiastic support of Ahmad Chalabi, an exile Shi’i Iraqi convicted in Jordan of bilking a bank out of $80 million. Wolfowitz’s favorite Iraqi, Chalabi identified exact locations where WMD would be found. According to at least one news story, however, he was always wrong.

The neocon think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC) lived—dare we guess that it still does?—in an ideological “other world.” PNAC ideology mandated that there had to be a change of regime in Iraq—which meant that a reason had to be found to attack Saddam Hussain. In the end, the neocons fabricated the WMD myth. Because they had the support of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, they transformed the myths into truth.

But not quite.

Andrew I. Killgore, a retired foreign service officer and former ambassador to Qatar, is publisher of the Washington Report.

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