When Did They Know?

I have had numerous discussions with friends about the origins of the war in Iraq where they argued that the Bush administration knew, without doubt, that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. A loose reading of Paul Pillar's article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs can lend some credence to this, though he does say that "there was indeed a broad consensus [in the intelligence community] that such programs existed."

(Parenthetically, Pillar's article gives an instructive description of the subtle ways that the analysis of data by the CIA was skewed by predelictions for policy of those at the top of the U.S. Government.)

My answer to my friends has included reference to Hans Blix's memoir, Disarming Iraq. Blix indicates that as late as early February 2003 he believed that his inspectors would find Iraq's WMD, despite their failure to turn up anything after months of trying.

Now, it appears that even Saddam's generals believed that they had them. The New York Times citing a classified Pentagon report, writes that:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

That was in December 2002.

In addition, an article in the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs, based on what appears to be the same report, includes this footnote:

For many months after the fall of Baghdad, a number of senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe it possible that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere (although they adamantly insisted that they had no direct knowledge of WMD programs). Coalition interviewers discovered that this belief was based on the fact that Iraq had possessed and used WMD in the past and might need them again; on the plausibility of secret, compartmentalized WMD programs existing given how the Iraqi regime worked; and on the fact that so many Western governments believed such programs existed.

If senior Iraqi officials believed these weapons existed, it cannot be surprising that American officials, and American intelligence, believed the same. Was this a casus belli? That is a different question. In my view it was not.

As often happens when policy goes wrong, critics can be divided into those who believe those responsible were knaves, who did wrong purposefully, and those who believe they were fools, who did wrong out of ignorance or stupidity. The last word may be too strong--President Bush and his advisors are not stupid. But they were fools, not knaves.