Clinton vs. Bush on Iraq: Updated
Some things are actually becoming clearer.
Paul O'Neill, who is hurting his own credibility with his new book, says he was shocked--shocked!--to discover that plans to invade Iraq were being seriously considered in the White House right after the 2000 electioin--long before 9/11.
As Glenn Reynolds and others are saying, this should not have come a shock, since it continued the approach of Bill Clinton. Saddam was an enemy, and the U.S. should bring about regime change in Iraq as soon as possible. (See Reynolds again, with lots of links and quotes, here).
What has really brought things together for me are the comments by Ken Pollack in a new exchange of views on Slate. (Pollack is the author of The Threatening Storm, a book which has inspired many people to think the U.S. invasion was necessary and desirable when Bush launched it). Pollack says he was convinced until recently, based on his work in the Clinton White House, that Saddam had WMDs. He has been quite surprised to conclude that according to credible sources, Saddam had no WMDs to speak of for many years--although he had "rudimentary elements" of programs that were "not very active" so that he could re-start production of at least some weapons if the opportunity arose.
"For me, there is no escaping the fact that the prewar intelligence estimates regarding Iraq's WMD programs--and particularly its nuclear program--were wrong. Iraq was not 4-5 years away from having a nuclear weapon, as I and the rest of the Clinton administration had been led to believe.... the threat from Iraqi WMD (and particularly nuclear weapons) was much, much further away than was believed, but it was not gone completely....the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96."
Pollack still thinks he would have supported war in March 2003, even with this information in mind. He would do so first for humanitarian reasons--to give Iraqis a better life--secondly as a way of stopping Saddam's unstable and dangerous decision-making--regardless of what weapons he had--and, the weakest reason, because of a "residual" WMD threat.
He's still not sure there was a better alternative than war available: "I still find the alternatives all pretty bad--although some are not necessarily as bad as I thought them before the war." Deterrence might have worked: "While I think Saddam's astonishingly reckless behavior before the war only confirms the prevailing view among Iraq experts that this was not someone we would have wanted to trust with nuclear weapons, the postwar revelations suggest that he was so much further away from having those nuclear weapons that we might have safely opted for deterrence in the expectation that we could have found an alternative way to deal with him in the years before he did get his hands on a nuke."
I think the most revelatory, even devastating passages have to do with neo-cons and Ahmed Chalabi.
"I think the war put to rest the fantasies of the neocons that we could simply arm Ahmad Chalabi and a few thousand followers (followers he still has not actually produced), give them air cover, and send them in to spark a rolling revolution. Richard Perle and others argued for that initially, but in the end they had to support a full-scale invasion as the only realistic course. The covert-action-based regime-change policies that I and others in the U.S. government had pushed for as an alternative never had a high likelihood of success, either--they were just slightly more likely to produce a coup and much less likely to create a catastrophic 'Bay of Goats,' as Gen. Anthony Zinni once put it."
In short, the neo-cons had the stupidest plan of all--closely modelled on the notorious Bay of Pigs, with allies--defectors from the target regime--roughly as unreliable as in the Cuban situation. (Also let's not forget Iran-Contra, and an earlier attempt at a "Bay of Goats" in Iraq). Chalabi got the support of the Clinton White House, and presumably, later from the Bush White House, on the basis of lies about allies of his who would materialize to fight side-by-side with American military personnel.
Pollack doesn't quite draw the final connection. Did Chalabi also lie about Saddam's WMDs? Or did he simply repeat lies that were circulating in Iraq, lies that were deliberately spread there either by scientists and generals who wanted to claim success for their own favourite weapons facilities, or by Saddam, constantly trying to look tough?
In either case, the Bush White House seems to have fallen for the same lies that the Clinton White House did. That explains the continuity. Pollack says he and others working for Clinton wanted to invade Iraq in the 90s, but there was no public support for doing so before 9/11. After 9/11, Bush acted on the basis of a totally changed American public opinion, and on the basis of the Chalabi lies that had been circulating for years.
For those trying to figure out exactly how things happened, the question is whether, when you strip away the false information that kept getting swallowed at the White House, the invasion really made sense from the point of view of U.S. interests. Of course, things could still turn out well there, and dominoes may fall in the right way in other countries.
Tom Friedman, joining the exchange with Pollack, says he was skeptical that a democracy could be built in the Middle East, but when things went more or less well in Afghanistan, he became confident that something good could be built in Iraq as well. Like the neo-cons, he speaks of setting an example, and even shifting the tide, in the entire region. (Friedman doesn't speak of democracy, but of building a "a new and more decent context," bringing about a "decent outcome". He says he never bought the WMDs rationale).
And I ask again: how could two White Houses be so completely unable to confirm what was going on in Iraq, leaving them dependent on Chalabi?
Some will say I go on about this as if it were all taking place in a classroom. That is indeed a tendency I can fall into. Friedman and Paul Berman make a similar point: 9/11 proved that there were still totalitarians in the world, despite the end of the Cold War. Like all totalitarians, these people hated liberal society above all. Something had to be done, somewhere, to prove that liberal society would fight back, and Iraq seemed at least relatively manageable.
Update: Things get a bit more complicated in Pollack's new article in the Atlantic. (I found the link via Gregory Djerejian, Tom Maguire, and ultimately via Instapundit).
Here Pollack presents more of the official story of what went wrong with intelligence on Iraq, and less of the Monty Python story.
Pollock emphasizes how important the WMD rationale was to the Bush administration:
"The U.S. intelligence community's belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me and other Administration officials to support the idea of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, albeit not right away. The NIE's judgment to the same effect was the real linchpin of the Bush Administration's case for an invasion."
It is now known that this was not true. There was consistency between the Clinton and Bush administrations in their reliance on intelligence reports that paint a very troubling picture of WMDs in Iraq. There was also a difference, though, according to Pollack: Bush officials (led by the Office of Special Plans, and Rumsfeld's and Cheney's staffs) would selectively quote from a mass of material, so as to present only the worst-case scenarios. For example, if Saddam acquired fissile material, he might be able to build nuclear weapons in a year. According to many reports, this was a possibility, but at the extreme of worst cases. It was therefore misleading to present it as Bush and Cheney, in particular, did.
The Bush administration tended to believe everything "Chalabi and the defectors" (almost a Motown group) said; the Clinton administration, according to Pollack, did not.
What about the intelligence consensus, which itself greatly exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq, and which Pollack was part of? (Christopher Hitchens, joining the exchange on Slate, teasingly says that in his official days Pollack was a producer, not simply a consumer of (sometimes deeply false and misleading) intelligence). On this Pollack tells a complicated story.
I think the main points are these. Before 1991, the UN weapons inspectors seriously understated the capability, particularly the nuclear capability, of Saddam's regime. In a way it was lucky that Saddam over-reached by invading Kuwait, resulting in forced inspections, because that began a process of meaningful inspections and the destruction of key facilities. The same mistake was made again between 1991 and 1994; some weapons were found, but Saddam succeeded in keeping some hidden. It was events in 1995-96 that really opened things up. (After 1991 the inspectors were part of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM)).
By 1995 or 1996, it now turns out, Saddam had destroyed virtually everything that is meant by a WMD program. Sometimes he destroyed a facility that had been found by international inspectors, but he also went beyond that and destroyed things that no outsider was aware of. Hence the tendency of Western intelligence to continue to believe he had things he did not.
(Jack Balkin paraphrases part of the Washington Post story, linked above, as follows: "The only thing that Hussein's government had were drawings of weapons of mass destruction, with no present ability to make those drawings into a reality." Pollack still doesn't go that far, especially in the Atlantic article; he appeals to David Kay's references to a program that can be re-started, precursors, dual-use facilities, and what not. Kay was supposed to produce a final report, confirming some or all of this. Instead, he is not talking to the media. There is a sense that he would prefer to drop the subject of weapons in Iraq, rather than report formally: nothing, nothing, nothing.)
The high-profile defection of Saddam's son-in-law and others helped to bring out a lot of information. Apparently in order to avoid being forced to turn facilities over, Saddam destroyed them and left a vague impression that some of them still existed.
There is a sidebar that has its funny side as well. The U.S. had an enormous amount of data on the raw materials for WMDs that had been shipped into Iraq. They kept searching for proof that all this material had either been made into weapons that still existed, or destroyed.
Pollack: "...it is likely that some of the discrepancies between UNSCOM and Iraqi figures are no more than the result of sloppiness. Saddam's Iraq was not exactly an efficient state, and many of his chief lieutenants were semi-literate thugs with no understanding of esoteric technical matters and little regard for how things should be done--their only concern was that Saddam's demands be met." U.S. officials exaggerated the competence of people in Iraq--isn't that in itself an example of incompetence?
Why did Saddam destroy his weapons so completely, on the one hand, and yet keep up such a brave front, on the other? The destruction, it seems, was to eliminate the risk of WMD programs and facilities being found by outsiders. For one thing, Saddam kept hoping sanctions would be lifted, and he thought the lack of actual finds would help. For another, being forced to give up his weapons might weaken him in the eyes of many people.
Saddam remained very confrontational, even threatening, to UNSCOM officials themselves, so he wasn't exactly trying to convince those people, or the West, that he had nothing--only that they couldn't prove what he had. All of this reinforced the Western perception that he was still hiding a lot. What was more important to Saddam, however, was probably frightening his neighbours, and his own people. Uprisings were a fairly common occurrence.
"He may have feared that if his internal adversaries realized that he no longer had the capability to use these weapons, they would try to move against him. In a similar vein, Saddam's standing among the Sunni elites who constituted his power base was linked to a great extent to his having made Iraq a regional power--which the elites saw as a product of Iraq's unconventional arsenal. Thus openly giving up his WMD could also have jeopardized his position with crucial supporters."
Saddam miscalculated in the sense that he forced huge sacrifices on himself by giving up the actual weapons, yet the sanctions weren't lifted, so the people as a whole suffered as well. After a few years, it was more and more difficult for him to admit the truth that this had all been, in a way, for nothing.
What about the possibility that scientists and others simply lied to Saddam, assuring him that programs were going well when they in fact had ground to a halt? Pollack admits there is probably something to this, but there would have been too great a risk of torture and murder for anyone who failed to do what they were told. This raises the question of just how Stalinist the regime was, and I will come back to that.
Beginning in 1996, things began to go more Saddam's way--the oil for food program, intended to provide some humanitarian relief despite the sanctions, helped, and the program was also easily abused. By December of 1998 Saddam's harrassment of the inspectors became so severe, the UN pulled them out.
More Monty Python: the CIA had depended heavily on UNSCOM officials for information on what was going on in Iraq. They infiltrated inspection teams in order to make their own observations, and in 1996, to help plan a coup. It is partly because he suspected this activity was going on that Saddam was less and less willing to allow inspections to take place. The CIA had over-reached themselves, and when the UN inspectors were withdrawn, there was little accurate information to go on at all.
The myth that Saddam was heavily armed prevailed; Pollack is able to cite many countries and agencies that said the same thing throughout the 90s. (It wasn't only him!) There was no real way of checking. Saddam, for reasons of his own, allowed it to be maintained even up to the point when the U.S. invaded. Either he simply refused to believe this would happen, as Pollack says, or he decided that he was finished anyway. With proof of no WMDs, there were many groups within Iraq that would turn on him.
The Bush administration concluded that Saddam was militarily strong, but he would be easy to replace with a better government. The truth was something like the converse: he was weak, but not so easy to replace given all the factions in Iraq. (And the concern in Syria and Turkey about what happens to the Kurds, and in Iran about the Shiites).
Pollack's is one of the accounts that makes it clear Saddam was afraid of almost every living person in Iraq. Stalin? Hitler? It hardly seems so. (See again John Mueller's presentation of Iraq before the invasion, discussed earlier here and here).
Pollack's proposals to prevent further embarrassments of this kind are to give more money to the CIA, and make the Director more powerful--more independent of political pressure. In particular, intelligence agencies that now report to the Secretary of Defence should report to the DCI. Well, they do say military intelligence is an oxymoron.
|
