The lede in today’s WaPo print edition is Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus’ piece, “A Flawed Argument In the Case for War.”
The information was so startling that CIA Director George J. Tenet, accompanied by Vice President Cheney, marched up to Capitol Hill to brief the four top Senate and House leaders the day after Labor Day 2002. The administration was gearing up to present its case against Iraq at the United Nations, and lawmakers were eager for any evidence that would prove Saddam Hussein was a grave threat.
In the briefing, Tenet and Cheney presented what one participant described as a “smoking gun” : New intelligence showed Iraq had developed unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) that could deliver chemical or biological agents. In addition, Iraq had sought software that would allow it to produce sophisticated mapping of eastern U.S. cities. President Bush hinted at the evidence in a speech on Oct. 7, 2002.
And a year ago, when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made a lengthy presentation before the U.N. Security Council, he echoed the concern: “Iraq could use these small UAVs, which have a wingspan of only a few meters, to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to other countries, including the United States.”
Since Powell’s speech, however, investigations by U.S. weapons inspectors have determined that the UAVs, or drones, were not designed to spread deadly toxins but to fly unarmed reconnaissance missions.
The story of the UAVs — just one part of the vast array of claims made by the Bush administration about Iraq’s alleged weapons programs — is emblematic of how U.S. intelligence on Iraq was often wrong, even when officials made efforts to cull the strongest material from a torrent of information.
In preparing for his U.N. speech on Feb. 5, Powell had prided himself on spending long hours at the CIA, quizzing analysts who had developed the material and making certain the information had not just one source but was developed from a combination of human, signal and satellite intelligence. He even refused to include a reference to the mapping software that had spurred the congressional meeting, believing that it was not credible.
But in the end, much of that effort appeared to be for naught. David Kay, the chief U.S. inspector who recently resigned, has spent the past week telling reporters and Congress that there appear to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Only fragments of Powell’s presentation have been confirmed despite months of searching.
“It looks terrible,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “None of his core assertions about Saddam’s growing arsenal of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be true.”
The print edition has a giant chart which essentially Fisks the Powell speech, presenting snippets against “what we now know.”
The problem with all this is that it’s done with the advantage of hindsight. We had every reason to believe that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, harbored ambitions of acquiring nuclear weapons, and had made significant progress towards developing them two times before. We knew he had UAVs and other conventional weapon systems that could easily be armed with NBC weapons. Saddam had a treaty obligation to destroy all of his NBC stockpiles and provide documentary evidence that he had in fact done so. He failed to live up to that obligation. So, presuming that it turns out that the weapons we knew he had as late as 1998 were in fact secretly destroyed–which, frankly, defies all logic even though it increasingly looks to be the case–how is it that Powell and Co. were supposed to know this?
