David Kay's Last Words? 

David Kay's Last Words?

David Kay is not going to issue the "final report" on WMDs in Iraq that had been promised. Instead he is leaving his position, and he has offered a few less formal words to the media. (See also New York Times interview here).

Kay confirms that Iraq had no "large stockpiles" of WMDs in the last years before the U.S. invasion in 2003. He says there was no production program for such stockpiles in the 1990s. The nuclear program, while not exactly "dormant," was "rudimentary." It was "never as advanced" as the nuclear program in Iran and Libya. (We have recently been told that the Libyan program never proceeded beyond its "infancy").

"Dr. Kay said Iraq had also maintained an active ballistic missile program that was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the American invasion." Some of these missiles would have violated the limits place on Iraq by the UN; but they would not have been WMDs.

"Regarding biological weapons, he said there was evidence that the Iraqis continued research and development 'right up until the end' to improve their ability to produce ricin. 'They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization,' Dr. Kay said. 'They were maintaining an infrastructure, but they didn't have large-scale production under way.'"

More gems:

"Dr. Kay added that there was now a consensus within the United States intelligence community that mobile trailers found in Iraq and initially thought to be laboratories for biological weapons were actually designed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel. While using the trailers for such purposes seems bizarre, Dr. Kay said, 'Iraq was doing a lot of nonsensical things' under Mr. Hussein.

"The intelligence reports that Iraq was poised to use chemical weapons against invading troops were false, apparently based on faulty reports and Iraqi disinformation, Dr. Kay said.

"When American troops found that Iraqi troops had stored defensive chemical-weapons suits and antidotes, Washington assumed the Iraqi military was poised to use chemicals against American forces. But interviews with Iraqi military officers and others have shown that the Iraqis kept the gear because they feared Israel would join an American-led invasion and use chemical weapons against them."

Elsewhere Kay has been quoted as saying the evidence today is quite contrary to what was believed by Western intelligence agencies in early 2003, and what was (therefore) said by Bush administration officials. The failures of intelligence need to be investigated.

Kay admits the possibility that WMDs were moved from Iraq to Syria, but says there is no "conclusive" evidence that this occurred. He also says there may have been documents destroyed during the post-invasion looting that would have provided more information.

Very much to President Bush's credit: "Dr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda on Iraq."

Kay now agrees that Iraqi scientists and technicians, rather than working on weapons programs, were falsely telling Saddam they were doing so. Western intelligence repeated and amplified these lies. There was also a "disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mr. Hussein," so that one unit of the Republican Guard, while having no WMDs themselves, would be convinced that other units had them.

Fred Kaplan suggests on Slate that Kay's credibility can be questioned because of the way he couched statements in his "interim" report. Hard factual statements that did not support Bush claims were surrounded, and basically hidden, by frightening-sounding obfuscation that would make people think: there must be something there that's still a secret! (The President's phrase in the SOTU--"weapons of mass destruction-related program activity" is a good sample of this genre). So any lingering comments from Kay that "there was something really scary there" can probably be discounted.

One article quotes him as saying there were scientists in Iraq who could produce WMDs if they had been asked to do so. My question: how many countries in the world would actually have no people with these skills? Secondly: if some WMDs are so easy to make, is it misleading to speak of taking out a government in order to eliminate this threat?

To sum up: No weapons. No "precursors." No "dual-use facilities." The "programs" may have been a memo saying: God (or Allah) I wish I had WMDs.

There are questions that still interest me. Did Bush differ from Clinton primarily in believing the stories told by the emigres, led by Ahmed Chalabi, which if anything were even more ridiculous than what the CIA said? (See news (via Hit and Run) on the emigres the Brits relied on for the "45 minute" claim.)

Secondly, did U.S. forces deploy and proceed in a way that indicated they knew there were no WMDs that were going to be used on them? If so, of course, what Glenn Reynolds calls the "tired 'Bush lied' meme" still has some support.

Bush had more up-to-date briefings than Clinton did. Yet Bush decided to invade. Hans Blix has said he was curious when sites that were supposed to contain weapons turned out to contain nothing. Why were U.S. officials not curious?

(See Calpundit post with comments; and Atrios. Christopher Hitchens actually suggested, in one of his shifting defences of Bush in Iraq, that U.S. forces proceeded as though they did not expect to encounter WMDs. His point was that the clear threat of U.S. invasion caused Saddam to destroy or ship out his weapons within months, not years, of the invasion. See discussion here).

This latter concern has a bearing on whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq was pre-emptive in any meaningful sense. I believe this also bears on an analysis according to Just War doctrine.