An interesting article from former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack. He explained here why he changed his mind being prowar before it and being anti war now. Sound opportunistic? May be, read first, after all only idiot never change their mind...

How did we get it so wrong?

With inquiries under way on both sides of the Atlantic, the failure of western intelligence over Iraq is coming under intense scrutiny. Yes, the spies got it wrong, admits former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, but the politicians also moulded the evidence to fit the case for war



Let's start with one truth: last March, when the US and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.

Democrats have typically accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq. Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programmes, although not to the extent that many people believe. The administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build support for military action.

This issue has some personal relevance for me. I began my career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where I saw an earlier generation of technical analysts mistakenly conclude that Saddam was much further away from having a nuclear weapon than the post-Gulf war inspections revealed. I later moved on to the National Security Council, where the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programmes following the withdrawal of the UN inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. In 2002 I wrote a book called Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in which I argued that because all our other options had failed, the US would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered the question of why we didn't find in Iraq what we were so certain we would.

The US intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing WMD was first advanced at the end of the 90s, at a time when Clinton was trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from Iraq was growing. In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence community's conclusions at the time: "Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbours ... Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously - and to threaten US territory with such weapons ... If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."

In October of 2002 the National Intelligence Council, the highest analytical body in the US intelligence community, issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD. A declassified version was released to the public in July of last year. Its principal conclusions:

· "Iraq has continued its WMD programmes in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." (The classified version of the NIE gave an estimate of five to seven years.)

· "Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energised its missile programme, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme."

· "If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year ... Without such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until the last half of the decade."

· "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX."

·"All key aspects ... of Iraq's offensive BW [biological warfare] programme are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war"

US analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly 20 former inspectors from the UN Special Commission (Unscom), established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did.

Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with US views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years. Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the US; Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February: "There is a problem - the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq." No one doubted that Iraq had WMD.

But it appears that Iraq may not have had any WMD. Caveats are in order: we do not yet have a complete picture of Iraq's WMD programmes, and initial US efforts to seek out WMD caches were badly lacking. Documents relating to the programmes are known to have been destroyed. Much of Iraq is yet to be explored. Now that Saddam is in custody, new information may be forthcoming.

Nevertheless, the preliminary findings of the Iraq Survey Group will probably not change dramatically. The then head of the ISG, David Kay, summarised those findings in testimony to Congress last October:

· Iraq had preserved some of its technological nuclear capability from before the Gulf war. However, no evidence suggested that Saddam had undertaken any significant steps after 1998 towards reconstituting the programme to build nuclear weapons or to produce fissile material.

· Little evidence surfaced that Iraq had continued to produce chemical weapons; only a minimal amount of clandestine research had been done on them. Nevertheless, Iraqi officials seemed to believe that they could convert existing civilian pharmaceutical plants to chemical-weapons production.

· Iraq made determined efforts to retain some BW capabilities. It maintained an undeclared network of laboratories and other facilities "suitable for preserving BW expertise ... and continuing R&D."

· Iraq seemed to have been most aggressive in pursuing proscribed missiles. In Kay's words, "detainees and cooperative sources indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of ballistic missiles with ranges of at least [240 miles] and up to [620 miles] and that measures to conceal these projects from [UN inspectors] were initiated in late 2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors." The Iraqis were also working on rocket engines in order to produce a longer-range missile. Most troubling of all, the ISG uncovered evidence that from 1999 to 2002 Iraq had negotiated with North Korea to buy technology for No Dong missiles, which have a range of 800 miles.

Overall, these findings suggest that Iraq did retain prohibited WMD programmes, but that they were not so extensive, advanced, or threatening as the NIE maintained.

More cautious analysts had argued that the NIE's assessment that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was unlikely, because such munitions deteriorate rapidly and can be quickly produced in bulk, making stockpiles unnecessary. These analysts instead believed that Iraq had a "just-in-time" capability, but not even this more conservative scenario was borne out by the ISG. Sources told the group that Saddam and his son Uday had each, on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002, asked Iraqi officials how long it would take to produce chemical agents and weapons. One reportedly told Saddam that it would take six months to produce mustard gas; another told Uday that it would take two months to produce mustard gas and two years to produce sarin (a simple nerve agent). The questions do not suggest the presence of large stockpiles. The answers do not support a just-in-time capability.

The belief that Iraq was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me and other administration officials to support the idea of a full-scale invasion, albeit not right away. The NIE's judgment to the same effect was the linchpin of the Bush administration's case for invasion.

What we have found in Iraq since the invasion belies that judgment. Saddam did retain basic elements for a nuclear-weapons program and the desire to acquire such weapons at some point, but the programme itself was dormant. Saddam had not ordered its resumption. In all probability Iraq was considerably further from having a nuclear weapon than the five to seven years estimated in the NIE.

Figuring out why we overestimated Iraq's WMD capabilities involves figuring out what the Iraqis were thinking and doing throughout the 1990s. The story starts right after the Gulf war. An Iraqi document that fell into the inspectors' hands revealed that in April 1991 a high-level Iraqi committee had ordered many of the country's WMD activities to be hidden from inspectors. According to Unscom's final report, one facility "was instructed to remove evidence of the true activities at the facility, evacuate documents to hide sites, make physical alterations to the site to hide its true purpose [and] develop cover stories". A great deal of other information substantiates the idea that Saddam at first decided to try to keep a considerable portion of his WMD programmes intact and hidden. However, it became increasingly clear how difficult this would be. In the summer of 1991 inspectors tracked down and destroyed Saddam's calutrons. Their discoveries may have convinced him that he would have to put his WMD programmes on hold until after the sanctions were lifted - something he reportedly thought would happen within months.

But the inspectors proved more tenacious and the international community more steadfast than the Iraqis expected. Accordingly, from June of 1991 to May of 1992 Iraq unilaterally destroyed parts of its WMD programmes. This helped Baghdad conceal more-important elements of the programmes, because the regime could point to the destructions as evidence of cooperation.

In 1995 matters changed. That August, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the head of Iraq's WMD programmes, defected to Jordan, prompting a panicked Baghdad to turn over hundreds of thousands of pages of new documentation to the UN. According to the former chief UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, Kamel's statements and the Iraqi documents squared with what Unscom had been finding: although all actual weapons had been eliminated, either by the UN or in the earlier destructions, Iraq had preserved production and R&D programmes. Although the Iraqis tried to withhold any highly incriminating documents from the UN, they overlooked several containing crucial information about previously concealed aspects of the nuclear and biological programmes.

Other secrets were laid bare that same year. A US-UN sting operation caught the Iraqis trying to smuggle 115 missile gyroscopes through Jordan. Iraq was forced to admit to the existence of a facility to build Scud-missile engines, and to destroy a hidden plant for manufacturing modified Scuds. It was forced to admit to having made much greater progress on its nuclear programme before the Gulf war. Most important, it was forced to admit that a very large biological-weapons plant at al-Hakim, whose existence had been concealed from UN inspectors, had produced 500,000 litres of biological agents in 1989 and 1990, and that it was still functional in 1995.

Either late in 1995 or in 1996, Saddam probably recognised that trying to retain his just-in-time capability had become counterproductive. The inspectors kept finding pieces of the programmes, and each discovery pushed the lifting of the sanctions further into the future.

It's important to keep in mind that Saddam's internal position in this period was very shaky and he probably decided to scale back his WMD programmes, keeping only the bare minimum needed to rebuild them at some point. So, having decided to give up so much of his WMD capability, why didn't Saddam change his behaviour toward the UN inspectors and demonstrate a spirit of cooperation? Even after 1996 the Iraqis took a confrontational posture toward Unscom. The world inferred from this defiance that Saddam was still not complying with the UN resolutions, and the sanctions therefore stayed in place.

The first and most obvious answer is that Saddam still had some things to hide. Undoubtedly he did, but this answer is not entirely satisfying. Iraq was able to conceal the minimised remnants of its WMD programmes so well that Unscom found little incriminating evidence in 1997 and 1998. This early success should have given Saddam the confidence to begin to cooperate more fully.

An alternative explanation, offered by Iraq's former UN ambassador, Tariq Aziz, is that Saddam was pretending to have WMD to enhance his prestige among Arab nations. This explanation doesn't ring completely true either. If prestige had been more important to him than lifting sanctions, it would have been more logical to simply retain his WMD capabilities.

Saddam's behaviour may have been driven by completely different considerations. He has always evinced much greater concern for his internal position than for his external status. He has made any number of highly foolish foreign-policy decisions in response to domestic problems that he feared threatened his grip on power. Ever since the Iran-Iraq war, WMD had been an important element of Saddam's strength within Iraq. He used them against the Kurds in the late 1980s and during revolts after the Gulf war, he sent signals that he might use them against both the Kurds and the Shi'ites. Openly giving up his WMD could also have jeopardised his position with crucial supporters.

Furthermore, Saddam may have felt trapped by his initial reckoning that he could fool the UN inspectors and that the sanctions would be short-lived. Because of this mistaken calculation he had subjected Iraq to terrible hardships. Suddenly cooperating with the inspectors would have meant admitting that his course of action had been a mistake.

In some respects Saddam's fortunes began to rise in 1996. Although the CIA-backed coup attempt may have signified internal weakness, the fact that Saddam snuffed it out signified strength. Also, to avenge the Iraqi army's 1995 defeat at Irbil, Saddam manipulated infighting among the Kurds to allow his Republican Guards to drive into the city, smash the Kurd defenders, and arrest several hundred CIA-backed rebels. As the historian Amatzia Baram has persuasively argued, these successes made Saddam feel secure enough to swallow his pride and accept UN Resolution 986, the oil-for-food programme, which he had previously rejected. Oil-for-food turned out to be an enormous boon for the Iraqi economy.

The oil-for-food programme itself gave Saddam clout to apply toward lifting sanctions. Under Resolution 986 Iraq could choose to whom it would sell its oil and from whom it would buy its food and medicine. Baghdad could therefore reward cooperative states with contracts. Not surprisingly, France and Russia regularly topped the list. Iraq could set the prices - and since Saddam did not really care whether he was importing enough food and medicine for his people's needs, he could sell oil on the cheap and buy food and medicine at inflated prices as additional payoff to friendly governments.

By 1997 the international environment had changed markedly, in ways that probably convinced Saddam that he didn't need to cooperate with the inspectors. The same international outcry that prompted the oil-for-food deal was creating momentum for lifting sanctions completely. At that point it was reasonable for Saddam to believe that in the not-too-distant future the sanctions either would be lifted or totally undermined, and he would never have to reveal the remaining elements of his WMD programmes. Only in 2002, when the Bush administration suddenly focused its attention on Iraq, would Saddam have had any reason to change this view. And then, according to a variety of Iraqi sources, he simply refused to believe that the Americans were serious.

Another explanation should be posited. This is the notion that Saddam did not order the programme scaled down, but Iraqi scientists ensured that it did not progress and deceived Saddam into believing that it was much further along than it was. Numerous Iraqi scientists have claimed this. But many such accounts are undoubtedly self-serving, concocted in the aftermath of his defeat.

Everyone outside Iraq missed the 1995-1996 shift in Saddam's strategy - that is, to scale back his WMD programmes to minimise the odds of further discoveries - and assumed that Iraq's earlier behaviour was continuing.

Context is crucial to understanding any intelligence assessment. Prior to 1991 the intelligence communities in the US and elsewhere believed that Iraq was at least five, and probably closer to 10, years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. After the war we learned that in 1991 Iraq had been only six to 24 months away.

This revelation stunned the analysts. The lessons they took from it were that Iraq was determined to acquire nuclear weapons and would go to any lengths to do so; that the Iraqis were superb at concealment; and that inspections were inherently flawed.

These lessons were strongly reinforced by the revelation of Iraq's attempts in the first four years after the war to preserve significant parts of its WMD programmes. By about 1994 Unscom believed, incorrectly, that it had largely disarmed Iraq. Many intelligence analysts disagreed, but they were hard-pressed to substantiate their suspicions - until Kamel's defection, in 1995, and subsequent Iraqi admissions. These developments came as a profound shock to the UN inspectors, who resolved that Iraq could never again be trusted. Thus, just when Iraq was in all likelihood giving up efforts to maintain its just-in-time production capability, the rest of the world became hardened in its conviction that Saddam would never abandon or even reduce his efforts to acquire WMD.

In December of 1998 the inspectors withdrew from the country. Their decision to do so came after Iraq announced, in August of that year, that it would no longer cooperate with them at all, and after repeated crises demonstrated that Baghdad's announcement was not just bluster.

The end of the UN inspections appears in retrospect to have been a much greater problem than anyone recognised. The inspectors had been the best source of information on Iraq and its WMD programmes. Many western intelligence agencies, faced with other issues that demanded their resources, increasingly relied on Unscom. And Unscom had something that American intelligence did not - physical access to Iraq.

When the inspectors suddenly left, intelligence agencies were caught off balance. Desperate for information, they began to trust sources that they would previously have had Unscom vet. With so little to go on, they believed many reports that now seem deeply suspect. After 1998 many analysts increasingly entertained worst-case scenarios - scenarios that gradually became mainstream estimates.

Another element that contributed to faulty assessments was Iraqi rhetoric. Imagine that you were a CIA analyst in June 2000 and heard Saddam make the following statement: "If the world tells us to abandon all our weapons and keep only swords, we will do that ... if they destroy their weapons. But if they keep a rifle and then tell me that I have the right to possess only a sword, then we would say no. As long as the rifle has become a means to defend our country against anybody who may have designs against it, then we will try our best to acquire the rifle." It would be very difficult not to interpret Saddam's remarks as an announcement that he intended to reconstitute his WMD programmes.

The final element in the context for our pre-invasion analysis involved discrepancies between how much WMD material went into Iraq and how much Iraq could prove it had destroyed. The UN inspectors obtained virtually all the import figures. They then asked the Iraqis to either produce the materials or account for their destruction. In many cases the Iraqis could not. These are the numbers that the world regularly heard Bush administration officials intone during the run-up to the war. In hindsight there are legitimate reasons to question these numbers. Saddam's Iraq was not exactly an efficient state, and many of his chief lieutenants were semi-literate thugs with little regard for how things should be done - their only concern was that Saddam's demands be met.

The intelligence community's overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush administration handled the intelligence. Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that.

According to them, many administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that Saddam was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle East and was an imminent danger to the US because of his perceived possession of WMD and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the US. They believed that the agency, not the administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.

Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior administration officials were subjected to barrages of questions and requests for additional information, and were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence. Reportedly, the worst fights were over sources. The administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded.

On many occasions administration officials' requests for additional information struck the analysts as being made merely to distract them. Some asked for extensive historical analyses and requests were constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that conformed to the views of administration officials - pieces by conservative newspaper columnists, who had no claim to superior insight into the workings of Iraq.

Of course, no policymaker should accept intelligence estimates unquestioningly. Any official who does less is derelict in his or her duty. However, at a certain point curiosity and diligence become a form of pressure.

As Seymour Hersh, among others, has reported, Bush administration officials also took some actions that arguably crossed the line between rigorous oversight of the intelligence community and an attempt to manipulate intelligence. They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, to sift through the information themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.

Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false. In particular it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader was the administration-backed Ahmed Chalabi. It is true that the intelligence community believed some of the material that came from the INC - but not most of it. One of the reasons the OSP generally believed the INC was that they were telling it what it wanted to hear - giving the OSP further incentive to trust these sources over differing, and ultimately more reliable, ones. Thus intelligence analysts spent huge amounts of time fighting bad information and trying to persuade officials not to make policy decisions based on it.

The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to those in the highest levels of government, often passing raw, unverified intelligence straight to the cabinet level as gospel. Senior officials made public statements based on reports that the larger intelligence community knew to be erroneous (for instance, that there was hard evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaida). The machinations of the OSP meant that whenever the principals of the National Security Council met with the president and his staff, two different versions of reality were on the table.

The CIA, the state department, and the uniformed military services would present one version, and the Office of the Secretary of Defence and the Office of the Vice President would present another. These views were too far apart to allow for compromise. As a result, the administration found it difficult, if not impossible, to make important decisions. And it made some that were fatally flawed, including many relating to postwar planning, when the OSP's view - that Saddam's regime simultane ously was very threatening and could easily be replaced by a new government - prevailed.

The problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for war.

As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intelligence estimates that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to the time frame for Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon - the issue that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world. Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear weapon in five to seven years if it had to produce the fissile material indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a year if it could obtain the material from a foreign source. The intelligence community considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do so for 25 years with no luck. However, time after time senior administration officials discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community's most likely scenario. Some examples:

· In a radio address on September 14, 2002, President Bush warned, "Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons programme, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year."

· On October 7, 2002, the president told a group in Cincinnati, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."

· Vice President Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press on September 14 2003:"The judgment in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material, weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a few months to a year."

None of these statements in itself was untrue. However, each told only a part of the story - the most sensational part. These statements all implied that the US intelligence community believed that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon within a year unless the US acted at once. Some defenders of the administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defence attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client. But a defence attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The president is responsible for serving the entire nation. For the administration to withhold or downplay some of the information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.

What we have learned about Iraq's WMD programmes since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed. I had been convinced that Iraq was only years away from having a nuclear weapon - probably only four or five years. That estimate was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit. My reluctant conviction that war was our only option (although not at the time or in the manner in which the Bush administration pursued it) was not entirely based on the nuclear threat, but that threat was the most important factor.

The war was not all bad. But at the very least we should recognise that the administration's rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we thought we knew in March 2003. It appears even more reckless in light of what we know today.

· This is an edited version of an article which appears in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly.