"Intelligent" Look at the Decision to Invade Iraq

In all the political posturing over intelligence failures, the core reality of the world that we live in gets completely lost. This post isn't arguing that our intelligence agencies from the CIA, DIA, FBI or NSA are free from criticism, but the central argument of "President Bush defends war, in spite of intelligence failures," is a rhetorical curveball thrown to demonstrate that the President, although there have been three elections with each more successful that its predecessor and an insurgency that is increasingly being alienated from the general Iraqi population, still cheated and lied about taking us to war. And because of that, the war has to be declared an "illegal" sham.

Intelligence as a field is not an exact science. By its very nature it is required to work in the gray areas, trying to link certain elements (which normally do NOT want to be found) to fit together to help decision makers make either military or political decisions. The elements could be anything from information gained through a wire tap, evidence found in a former "safe house", satellite imagery, HUMINT (Human Intelligence: "spies"), or information gained from interrogation.

Those who are involved in these operations uncover a world that is extremely dangerous. They see characters and state-actors that are trying to either extend or solidify power through some rather dubious means.

Case in point, Strategypage reports on the frightening results of an audit that the new Ukrainian government recently found:

Ukraine has discovered that $32 billion worth of weapons and military equipment is missing. Throughout the 1990s, Eastern Europe was a prime source of cheap, Cold War surplus weapons. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, it was agreed that each of the 14 new countries would keep whatever weapons and equipment were on their territory. In the early 1990s, the new Ukrainian government was taken over (via elections) by former Soviet bureaucrats. These guys were finally deposed last year (by by massive demonstrations, and an election), and the new, rather less corrupt government, has been checking the books. They have found that between 1992 and 1996, $32 billion worth of weapons and military equipment disappeared. Apparently this gear was transferred to companies which then either sold the stuff for scrap, or to arms dealers who shipped the stuff all over the world. Government officials, at the time, apparently received substantial bribes to facilitate all this. It appears that the Ukrainians are valuing the lost equipment using the purchase price. The actual value is much less, but still worth a few billion bucks. The bribes paid probably exceeded $100 million. Most of the guilty dealers and officials have apparently left the country.

This is just a look into the underworld that our intelligence agencies operate in. Arms are being sold to people, and no one really knows where, but you have to assume that if someone is buying weapons, they intend to use them. Another frightening situation for the United States was revealed by Representative Curt Weldon, that there are several unaccounted-for suitcase nukes that penetrated U.S. borders during the Cold War.

The general proliferation of weapons is terrifying given their increasing lethality and destructive capabilities. Taken in context of September 11th, the United States could no longer tolerate belligerents that directly threaten the United States. After Afghanistan was quickly handled, the next man on the list was obvious: Saddam Hussein.

Here is Harold Hutchison on what we knew and what we didn't know before the invasion of Iraq:

These charges, however, were themselves a case of overstatement. Reports by David Kay and Charles Duelfer showed that Iraq was maintaining the ability to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles. General Tommy Franks described the Iraqi programs as being the equivalent of a disassembled pistol. This is hardly a severe intelligence failure- it is more a case of intelligence agencies taking the worst-case scenario (a prudent measure in the wake of a terrorist attack that had killed nearly 3,000 people and the underestimation of Iraq’s progress towards nuclear weapons after Desert Storm in 1991), and discovering that their assessments had been a little too pessimistic. In May of 2004, a sarin shell was used in a roadside bomb. American forces have also found at least one shell carrying mustard gas.

The other charge centers on the claims that the Administration has linked Saddam Hussein’s regime to the September 11 attacks. This is an outright misrepresentation of what the Administration has said about the rationale for liberating Iraq. The threat posed by Saddam Hussein was reassessed within the context of the attacks. This is not to say that there are no signs of a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. One document recovered by a Toronto Star reporter in April, 2003, discussed bringing an envoy from bin Laden to Baghdad to “discuss the future of our relationship” with Osama bin Laden. There were reports of contacts as well. Two of the most intriguing are Mohammed Atta’s reported meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April, 2001 and the actions of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir in Malaysia in January, 2000 (Shakir got a job as a greeter at Kuala Lampur’s international airport via the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia (which controlled his work schedule, attended an al Qaeda summit, then left Malaysia). An evidence summary for one al Qaeda detainee indicated that he traveled to Pakistan with an Iraqi intelligence officer for the purposes of carrying out an attack on the American and British embassies in August, 1998. Another document recovered by the Department of Defense during Operation Iraqi Freedom is an al Qaeda training manual for chemical warfare that contained papers concerning Iraqi officials, training, equipment prices, and manuals for setting up a chemical weapons plant. These documents were dated February, 2002.

These bits of information all put together on a table do not lead to a "smoking gun." They lead to a situation where a prudent actor needed to take pre-emptive action in order to prevent a "smoking gun" (i.e. another attack on the level or greater than September 11th). The fact that we didn't find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction is actually an extremely positive thing for us. As we see from the black market of stolen weapons in the Ukraine, there are numerous and well-funded people out there interested in purchasing weapons.

Now, did these weapons end up in al-Qaeda's hands? I can't be for certain, but they have a lot of money, and the weapons that we encountering in Afghanistan and Iraq are distinctly Soviet-era weapons. At some point, al-Qaeda has invested substantial money into the black market to build the murderous "armies" they have today. If Saddam actually had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, it isn't too much of a stretch to think that al-Qaeda wouldn't have gotten its hands on a few.

Taking all this into context, would you have let Saddam Hussein continue to sit on his belligerent throne giving the West the finger? If so, you are either a much bigger risk taker than me, more trusting of human nature, or a damn fool.