It doesn’t get much more damning than this: “There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation.” So saying the US Senate Intelligence Committee made clear in its report Friday that had it been aware of the utter inadequacy of the WMD intelligence its members and other legislators would never have approved the Iraq invasion.
A year ago, the US intelligence services provided the committee with some 15,000 pages of intelligence material. Subsequent requests for any further data produced another 15,000 pages. This mountain of paper together with exhaustive interviews of key players in Washington’s hunt for phony WMD has led to the present report. Still to come is a further report into whether the Bush administration misused and exaggerated the intelligence it was fed.
What the current document makes clear in its detailed but sometimes heavily censored 512 pages is that it does not believe that the CIA or other US intelligence agencies were pressured into manufacturing information about WMD when they could not find it. It is nonetheless scathing about the sloppiness and ineptitude of US spies. On the plus side, the committee also makes clear that the CIA in particular was seriously misled by Iraqi exiles with claimed links to Saddam’s war scientists, not least the discredited Ahmed Chalabi. More delicately, the committee blames the British for misinformation, particularly concerning the story that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger.
In Britain, the Butler enquiry into British WMD intelligence is due to report in a few days, though there are no plans for a specific enquiry into how the Blair government handled dubious intelligence to justify launching its armed forces against Iraq. If the White House and Downing street really did not knowingly take weak intelligence and build it up to provide a casus belli, then there remains the possibility that the information that the spy chiefs gave their political masters was inflated unbidden, because the spooks believed that was what the hour called for.
In that case the intelligence services in both countries are guilty of the most singular lack of rigor. The CIA, it should not be forgotten, was discovered with the fall of the Soviet Union to have hugely overestimated Moscow’s men and missiles. That was characterized as one of the agency’s most serious blunders. Ten years on, the good folk in Langley seem little better at their job.
Nevertheless what seems so curious is that even if the Americans found it hard to recruit agents within Saddam’s ruthless police state, they had the signal’s intelligence, the spy satellites and all the other espionage sources with which to check and compare a large part of the information coming out of Iraq. Somehow either that work was never done or, if it was done, someone somewhere did not want the conclusion to be drawn that Saddam no longer had viable WMD programs. This is clearly not the end of the matter.
