Stuart Cohen, who chaired the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate upon which most of the WMD angle to the Iraq War was based, believes that there are a number of myths about how intelligence in general works and, in particular, with respect to this particular issue. Among them:
Myth: We mistook rapid mobilization programs for actual weapons. Even with “only” rapid mobilization capabilities, Hussein would have been able to produce and stockpile such weapons in the run-up to a crisis, with little risk of being caught. There is practically no difference in threat between the two.
Myth: The NIE asserted that there were large WMD stockpiles and because we haven’t found them, then Baghdad had no WMD. We judged that Iraq probably possessed 100 to 500 metric tons of CW munitions fill. One hundred metric tons would fit in a back yard swimming pool; five hundred could be hidden in a small warehouse. We made no assessment of the size of Iraq’s biological weapons holdings, but a biological weapon can be carried in a small container. Lastly, despite considerable progress the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) is a long way from finishing its work.
We do not know whether the ISG ultimately will be able to find physical evidence of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons or learn the status of its WMD programs and its nuclear ambitions. Regime-directed destruction of evidence pertaining to WMD already has affected the ISG’s work. Iraqis who have been willing to talk to U.S. intelligence officers are in great danger; some have been killed. And finally, finding physically small but extraordinarily lethal weapons in a country that is larger than the state of California would be a daunting task even under far more hospitable circumstances.
Confronting allegations about the quality of the U.S. intelligence performance have forced senior intelligence officials to spend much of their time looking backward. I worry about the opportunities lost because of this preoccupation, but also that analysts laboring under a barrage of allegations will become more and more disinclined to make judgments that go beyond ironclad evidence — a scarce commodity in our business. If this is allowed to happen, the nation will be poorly served and ultimately much less secure. Fundamentally, the intelligence community increasingly will be in danger of not connecting the dots until the dots have become a straight line.
The search for WMD cannot and should not be about the reputation of U.S. intelligence. Men and women from across the intelligence community continue to focus on this issue because finding and securing weapons and the know-how that supported Iraq’s WMD programs before they fall into the wrong hands is vital to our national security. If we eventually are proved wrong — that is, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or abandoned — the American people will be told the truth; we would have it no other way.
An interesting argument, although I’m not sold on the conclusion. If, in fact, the reports of Iraqi WMD were fantastically overestimated, we surely need to fix the problem so that it doesn’t happen again. There’s a difference between a zero tolerance policy regarding failure–which would indeed chill bold analysis–and a total tolerance policy. One would think a balance could be found.
