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David
Kay, the recently retired head of the Iraq
Survey Group, makes dramatic claims about Iraq�s
weapons programs, including �we were all wrong.�
But does he have the necessary basis to do so?
Kay was only in Iraq for six months, and he left
because ISG personnel were being diverted to the
counter-insurgency effort. Thus, even that
limited period was not fully productive.
Nonetheless, Kay claims that Iraq had no
substantial quantities of proscribed weapons or
agents, even in the run-up to the war. That
material was pretty much destroyed in the latter
half of the 1990s, he claims.
Yet the ousted regime was
notoriously skilled at �Denial and Deception.�
Iraq�s Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, has
suggested an alternative explanation for the
inability to find those weapons. "The system of
hiding, of concealment was very sophisticated in
Iraq,� according to Zebari. In fact, he believes
that some weapons could still be
found.
Indeed, our previous
experience with Iraq suggests that Zebari may be
right. Until 1995, practically everyone underestimated
the extent of Iraq�s proscribed weapons programs
extant after the
1991 Gulf War. The prevailing assumption was
that most of that material had been destroyed in
the extensive bombing campaign that preceded the
ground war and that UNSCOM (the UN Special
Commission, charged with supervising the
destruction of Iraq�s biological and chemical
weapons and missiles) was slowly mopping up what
remained after the war.
Then, in August 1995,
Saddam�s son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who was in
charge of those programs, defected to Jordan.
The Iraqis panicked and revealed to UNSCOM that
all the weapons programs prohibited to them by
UN Resolution 687 were much larger and more
advanced than they had previously
acknowledged. (Former Clinton
administration official Kenneth Pollack is
simply wrong in his Atlantic
Monthly article, quoted approvingly by
the editors of the New
York Times in dating the
heightened concern about those weapons to the
late1990s�thereby letting both the Clinton
administration and himself off the hook for long
turning a blind eye to the danger those
WMDs posed. As late as January 1999,
Pollack vehemently argued that the �containment�
of Iraq was an effective policy.
Following Kamil�s
defection, the Iraqis claimed the material they
acknowledged producing had also been destroyed,
but the Iraqis provided no documentation to
corroborate that claim. UNSCOM attempted to do
so through interviews of Iraqi personnel, but
that proved no more satisfactory. UNSCOM
concluded that the material remained in Iraq.
UNSCOM�s concerns were
reflected in its October 11, 1995, report, the
first such report issued after Kamil�s
defection, as well as all subsequent
reports.
The real expertise
regarding Iraq�s weapons program lies not with
U.S. intelligence agencies, but with UNSCOM,
which was responsible for dealing with those
programs from 1991 until early 2000, when it was
dissolved in the face of Iraq�s intransigence
and replaced by UNMOVIC, a much weaker
organization. UNSCOM�s work was regularly
presented to the Security Council and had to
withstand the scrutiny of that body, including
Iraq�s friends there. Moreover, it was regularly
evaluated by outside teams.
The ISG has spent far
less time on this issue than UNSCOM; its
personnel are far less knowledgeable; and it has
certainly not opened its findings to outside
vetting. The ISG consists almost entirely of US,
British, and Australian intelligence. Of the
1,200 individuals initially sent to Iraq (many
in support positions), few were truly
knowledgeable. A significant number of former
UNSCOM people were supposed to be part of the
ISG, but at the last minute they were
scrapped. In the end, as one former UNSCOM
official estimated, perhaps five to ten
individuals in the ISG were truly informed about
Iraq�s weapons programs.
Apparently, the
intelligence agencies wanted the glory of
finding Iraq�s weapons themselves. With rare
exceptions, the ISG only began to admit UNSCOM
personnel in the fall of 2003, as the ISG ran
into troubles. Moreover, as there was extra
hazard pay for the work, some managers in the
intelligence community sent themselves, rather
than their more expert staff.
Most noteworthy, perhaps,
was the lack of biological expertise within the
ISG. Only one individual had experience in
that regard, Hamish Killip, a British citizen,
one of the few UNSCOM personnel to make it onto
the ISG early on. But Killip�s expertise
was munitions, rather than the biological agents
themselves.
The Iraqi regime made the
greatest effort to hide its biological program,
which, until the end, as Richard Butler,
UNSCOM�s last chairman, explained, was a �black
hole.� Considering the extreme nature of the
biological threat, the ISG�s lack of
knowledgeable individuals in this field was a
serious omission.
To get results quickly,
the ISG focused on interviewing Iraqi
scientists, rather than, for example, plowing
through the tons of documents in its possession.
Initially, the scientists were told that if they
co-operated, their prison terms would be
reduced. Not much of an incentive, as, clearly,
another option was to stonewall and face no
prison term whatsoever.
The ISG claims the
scientists were given every reason to work with
it, so, presumably, that position changed.
Nonetheless, there may well be reasons why Iraqi
scientists would not tell what they know.
Perhaps, their activities, if known, would
prompt genuine outrage and even a revocation of
whatever had been promised them; UNSCOM
suspected the regime engaged in the human
testing of biological weapons. Maybe full
confessions would lead to the conclusion that
Iraqi scientists had produced the military grade
anthrax sent to U.S. senators soon after the
9/11 attacks�or to Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist's office this week.
The scientists may
simply prefer to live the rest of their lives in
Iraq, rather than as exiles in the West. And
some Iraqis who gave the United States
information about Iraq�s weapons were
assassinated afterwards. While Saddam Hussein
remained at large�he was not captured until
December 13�the uncertainty about his
whereabouts and possible return to power had an
intimidating effect on the scientists, as the
ISG has itself acknowledged. And even now, some
key figures, like Dr. Germs (Rihab Taha) are not
talking.
Indeed, one former senior
UNSCOM official observed that the ISG has gotten
less out of the scientists than they had
previously admitted to UNSCOM. He also noted the
difficulties of getting information from them.
If they wanted to please you, they might tell
you want you wanted to hear, and the inverse was
also true. UNSCOM used to spend hours in
those interviews, asking the most picayune
questions.
Finally, Kay himself
reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee in
October that considerable effort was made after
the war to conceal Iraq�s weapons activities. As
Kay explained:
"We have been faced with a
systematic sanitization of documentary and
computer evidence in a wide range of offices,
laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD
work. The pattern of these efforts to erase
evidence�hard drives destroyed, specific files
burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of
use�are ones of deliberate, rather than random,
acts."
If there was no
significant illicit activity, why was such an
effort made to destroy
evidence?
It is not even clear that
Kay has the right to speak as he has since
stepping down. One experienced Washington
insider suggested the White House mishandled his
resignation. The resignation, and the reasons
for it, should have been announced. Kay�s
successor should then have assumed
responsibility for speaking on behalf of the
ISG.
To be sure, the ISG�s
work is of at least some value. Minimally, very
extensive steps were taken to hide all traces of
Iraq�s weapons programs. But it is premature to
reach the conclusions that Kay has articulated.
No one can legitimately claim that the ISG�s
work is superior to UNSCOM�s or that it renders
invalid UNSCOM�s judgments, which, in turn,
provided the basis for the pre-war estimates of
the U.S. intelligence
community.
President George W. Bush
has ordered an investigation into U.S.
intelligence on several rogue regimes, including
Iraq, and their weapons programs. That is all
for the good, but it does not mean that on the
war�s eve, Saddam did not possess significant
unconventional capabilities that justified the
war. Even a modest, but sophisticated,
biological weapons cache would have represented
an imminent, intolerable danger (which even Kay
suggests was a distinct possibility). Moreover,
the investigation into U.S. intelligence should
keep an open mind to the possibility that the
work of the ISG�the first time since 1991 that
the U.S. intelligence community has rendered
judgments on Iraq�s weapons independent of
UNSCOM�represents, in fact, the greatest U.S.
intelligence failure on this issue since that
time.
Laurie Mylroie is an
adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of Bush vs. the Beltway:
How the CIA and the State Department tried to
stop the War on Terror. She can
be reached through www.benadorassociates.com
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