February 01, 2004

Here's Melanie Phillips at the Telegraph (U.K.) which I think is one of the best analyses of the whole David Kay fiasco:
Dr Kay is not the useful idiot the anti-war party claims

Hardly had Lord Hutton finished summarising his report than the goalposts were promptly moved. Among those who were apoplectic that he had exonerated the Government and eviscerated the BBC, the cry arose that he hadn't addressed the "wider" issue.

This was that the Iraq war was based on false intelligence that Saddam posed a threat with his weapons of mass destruction. This myth has been reinforced by widespread media reports that Dr David Kay, who recently resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has said that no WMD actually existed in Iraq, thus proving that Saddam was no threat and we were led up the garden path to war.

If you look, however, at what Dr Kay actually said last week to the Senate Armed Services committee and in media interviews, a very different picture emerges. Certainly, he claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence which had misrepresented the situation. But he was specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles which he now thought were not there after all, and to the large-scale weapons programme which he said had been wound down after 1991.

This is a lie, as David Kay and the rest of us should know only too well:
when Saddam's sons-in-law defected from Iraq in 1995, they informed the UNSCOM inspectors that Saddam had concealed, lied about and hidden WMD programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. This led the UNSCOM team back into Iraq to oversee their dismantling, a process which continued until UNMOVIC inspectors (UNSCOM's weaker successor) were kicked out in 1998.
Here's CNN/Time's take on that story from March, 1998: Uncovering Iraqi Intrigue:

The SSO was handed the job of hiding the weapons programs at the end of the Gulf War, during the 15-day period when Iraq was ordered by the U.N. to list all its instruments of mass destruction. Over the next four years, the SSO did such an effective job of deception that by July 1995, UNSCOM was ready to declare its task done and close up shop. Then an extraordinary event happened: Saddam Hussein'sson-in-law, Lieut. General Hussein Kamel al-Majid, who had been in charge of Iraq's secret-weapons development, defected to Jordan, where he went public with details of the concealment program.

The Iraqi government tried to portray Kamel as a lone rogue who was himself concealing records; they thus led U.N. investigators to a Kamel-owned chicken farm, where they found more than a million pages of documents on Iraq's banned weapons programs. "The chicken-farm documents gave us a clear indication of how much we had missed," says UNSCOM deputy executive chairman Charles Duelfer.

Instead of disbanding, the U.N. redoubled its effort to find hidden documents and weapons, creating a "counterconcealment team," headed by former U.S. Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter. At one point, when Ritter and his team tried to enter an SSO facility in downtown Baghdad, a guard pointed a loaded gun at his head and prepared to fire. In the end Ritter, who spoke in depth for the first time about his work to CNN, did his job too well: he was accused of being a CIA spy and denied access to sensitive sites.

How ironic that Ritter, then accused of spying and almost getting shot as a CIA agent, would become a paid tool of the bad guys, as we can now conclude with virtual certainty as the name of the Iraqi patron who bankrolled Ritter's film has turned up on Saddam's "sweetheart list."
Ritter's near execution as a "CIA spy" also can only hint at how difficult it was and would continue to be for America and the West to get covert operatives for the purposes of gathering good intell into Iraq.
Happily, the UNSCOM inspector whom they cite about the chicken farm documents, Charles Duelfer, is going to be taking Kay's place as the new head of the Iraqi WMD search.
Notice, above all, that the 1995 Hussein Kamel episode establishes Saddam's SOP vis-a-vis the West (the US, the UN, the civilized world) right up until the day Coalition forces entered Iraq of lying about, hiding, concealing and obfuscating any evidence of WMD, while at the same time developing and proliferating them.
And noone should know this any better than David Kay.
To continue with Phillip's Telegraph piece, however:

Intelligence agencies, he said, had failed to grasp that in the corruption and chaos of the Iraqi regime, Saddam himself was being told lies about his weapons programmes, whose large-scale production had stalled under the pressure of UN inspections.[Which is precisely what they were designed to do.--J.T.]

Such a serious intelligence failure is clearly a huge political embarrassment for both President Bush and Tony Blair, prompting even the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to acknowledge that mistakes had been made and President Bush to say he wants to "know the facts".
[President Bush is now OK'ing a formal investigation into this, which is good. I'd like to know the facts myself, not because I doubt either the intell or his word, but because I'm sure Saddam had weapons and I want very much to know what happened to them so we know for sure that they aren't in the wrong hands still.--Jen]

But Dr Kay was not saying Saddam was therefore no threat on the WMD front. On the contrary, not only did he say it was possible that smaller WMD stockpiles remained hidden in Iraq, but that "right up to the end" the Iraqis were trying to produce the deadly poison ricin.

"They were mostly researching <better methods for weaponisation," he said. Not only that, Saddam had restarted a rudimentary nuclear programme. And he had also maintained an active ballistic missile programme that was receiving significant foreign assistance[Can you say "French?" How about "Russian?"] until the start of the war.

Such revelations corresponded with Dr Kay's interim report last autumn, which detailed "dozens of WMD-related programme activities" which had been successfully concealed from Dr Hans Blix's UN inspectors.

These included a clandestine network of laboratories containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research, and new research on the biological agents Brucella and Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever [That's Ebola to you and me, folks.]. Furthermore, a scientist who had hidden a phial of live Botulinum in his house had identified "a large cache of agents" that he had been asked, but had refused, to conceal and for which the ISG was now searching.

This all suggested, said Dr Kay, that after 1996 Saddam had focused on "smaller covert capabilities that could be activated quickly" to produce biological weapons agents. And last week he told this newspaper that he had discovered, from the interrogation of Iraqi scientists, that before the war Saddam had hidden WMD programme components in Syria.

So according to Dr Kay, Saddam had posed a very live threat indeed from WMD. Yet this evidence has been almost totally disregarded, as a nearly unanimous chorus of journalists has asserted that even Dr Kay said Iraq had no WMD.

Dr Kay's evidence has been brushed aside because of the assiduously promulgated myth that we only went to war because we were told that Iraq had WMD that were ready to use. But this is not so. We went to war because Saddam was grossly in breach of UN resolutions instructing him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme.

True, Bush and Blair asserted that he had WMD stockpiles which would be found. But this was not the reason for war. Such claims were only made to bolster the case to a public that seemed incapable of grasping that the reason for war was not the presence of WMD but the absence of evidence that it had been removed.

Failure to make this case successfully led Bush and Blair to claim - according to Dr Kay, in good faith but on the basis of flawed intelligence - that since these stockpiles were unaccounted for they were probably still there. That claim has now spectacularly backfired, since the failure to discover any WMD has merely led people to conclude that this proves the war was indeed ill-founded. But this is not so.

For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he had been assumed to be from his record, temperament, regional ambitions and links to terrorism.

How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don't count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no threat because it is only rudimentary.

To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam had become "even more dangerous" than had been realised, and, he said last week, "it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat".
[Although, I must note that President Bush didn't state in his SOTU last year that Saddam's threat was "imminent," but that we had to strike before that, because by the time that such a threat is "imminent," it's probably too late and invites an attack.--J.T.]
Yet virtually no one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge of Government duplicity by the anti-war brigade.

They have implied that Dr Kay resigned because he realised no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush administration for failing to give the ISG the money it needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi looters.

I'm not sure what Kay's motives are, if he's a usual idiot of the Left's anti-war brigade or what.
If Kay's team had found the WMD they thought they would, the Left would have accused Bush and Blair of having them planted.
As the Left would have it, the Coalition's military effort to disarm Iraq and to effect régime change is a "no-win" scenario for those who backed the war for no matter how it's viewed.
Some who back the war and President Bush and PM Blair think that our "intelligence" communities are to blame and an angry chorus of Americans have called for CIA Chief George Tenet's resignation.
But I don't think that the intelligence community is to blame.
They (and I'm including Britain's MI6) got the best intelligence they could and our leaders acted on it, relying on its accuracy.
This is all any government leader can do. Ever.
In fact, every Western government, including France, Germany, Belgium and Russia fully believed (if only because, as we now know, they'd sold Iraq the stuff, that Saddam had WMD and WMD programs.
At an EU summit dinner on Feb. 18, 2003, Blair challenged EU leaders to dispute the fact that Saddam had these WMD. Not one leader did (I did blog on this and on his attendant confrontation of Chirac's contrarian stance at the time.)
Saddam had those weapons.
Or if he didn't at the time of the war, he was going to get them.
(Do you remember what the big UN Tranzi cry was after Bush confronted the UN about Saddam? Not that the 16 previous resolutions should be enforced because the existence of the weapons was a threat to the world, but that Saddam's compliance with them should be ascertained as quickly as possible so that the sanctions could be lifted and business as usual could be recommenced!)
Maybe some were dismantled or destroyed.
Maybe some were shipped to Syria or Iran or Saudi Arabia or even Jordan.
But he had them.
And he had major links and ties to Islamist terrorism, including to Al Queda.
President Bush and PM Blair have nothing to explain or apologize for.
Bush should leave George Tenet in place, too.
Of course, nothing is being said from the usual detractors that since the Church Committee hearings in the post-Watergate fever swamp of the late 1970's, the CIA's funding has been gutted and its rules of operation in the field have been curtailed, although President Bush changed some of this after 9/11.
Worse still, Clinton furthered the degradation of our intell services, declaring that "humint" could be now be supplemented with information gathered electronically such as that from satellites, instead of human operatives on the ground.
With the 2 remaining Axis of Evil members Iran and North Korea ratttling nuclear sabres, as well as committing massive human rights abuses, the Left is trying to steer us back into the dangerous rapids of appeasement and looking the other way when it comes to rogue régimes...back to questioning our own intell agents, who risk their lives to get us this much needed information, and back to requiring an often unattainable legal standard of proof that the tyrannical leaders of these rogue states and the killers they sponsor are "guilty" of crimes against humanity.
This cannot and must not stand!
David Kay didn't find any weapons so far, this time.
And as Jed Babbin so aptly points out, the French and their Weasel allies gave Saddam at least 6 months or longer to get rid of those WMD, too.
That's all.
Bush told the truth and so did Blair.
Liberating Iraq and deposing Saddam was the Right Thing to Do.
Case closed.