Much of what we were told in the run up to the war was pure hype. This has become ever clearer in the aftermath of the initial phase. What is simply not plausible is that the Administration actually bought into its own hype. They did, of course, believe in the existence of WMD in Iraq, despite their own best intelligence and the findings of UN inspection teams on the ground. They had to have believed in WMD: otherwise they were proceeding into a possibly bloody and protracted war with minimum aid and support. Even if it were reasonable to imagine a Whitehouse apparatus so insulated by high approval ratings and confident in its ability to “wag the dog”, how could they have persuaded Tony Blair to accompany them? Surely Blair was not similarly insulated in the UK. Never-the-less it is now obvious that any belief in an impending WMD catastrophe originating in Iraq had to be based on speculation. Why? Because the evidence was clearly against the Administration’s claims long before the war started.
In a segment aired by Sixty Minutes II on Oct. 15 2003, correspondent Scott Pelley interviewed several people who knew there was scant evidence for the WMD threat. Greg Thielman, a former aid to Colen Powell, had the highest secrecy clearance and saw virtually everything that crossed Powell’s desk. According to him the evidence showed that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the US and in fact no imminent threat to any of his neighbors. Thielman, alleged the Whitehouse had a taste for what he called “faith-based intelligence”-- that is, “They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce.”
Houston Wood, a scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is among the world’s authorities on uranium enrichment by centrifuge. He and his colleagues were unanimous in their opinion that aluminum tubes found in Iraq and suspected by the Administration to be components for a centrifuge to enrich uranium, definitely could not serve or be modified to serve any such purpose. They made this unequivocally clear in reports to the Administration. In his February 5 speech at the UN, Powell never-the-less stated that, though there was some disagreement, most experts agreed the tubes were in fact destined for use in a centrifugal uranium enrichment program. Wood was flabbergasted by Powell’s remark: “Most experts are located at Oak Ridge”, he said, “and that was not the position there.”
Steve Alllinson, a UN inspector in Iraq in the months leading up to war, was also mystified by Powell’s assertions when he pointed out buildings on satellite surveillance photos and claimed they were munitions bunkers, each stockpiling “between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That’s enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” Trucks parked in proximity to the bunkers were “decontamination vehicles”, said Powell. But Allinson and fellow members of the inspection teams that had spent weeks running around investigating every tip, hunch, rumor, or guess that might possibly turn up proof of WMD knew that the vehicles were simply fire trucks. They had already investigated them in person, along with many other suspect vehicles that had turned out to have no connection to WMD. According to Allison, when Powell finished his speech, he and his fellow inspectors concluded, “They have nothing”.
And then there were the defectors. Here the intelligence vein was wider and deeper. Unfortunately the most tantalizing portion, from an Administration viewpoint, ran through the Iraqi National Congress in the form of one Adnan Sayeed Haideiri, a self-styled Iraqi civil engineer. The problem here was one of credibility. First of all, the INC, was a group of Iraqi exiles with motives, as Greg Thielman put it, “for presenting the worst possible picture of what was happening in Iraq to the American government.” David Albright, a physicist who has investigated defectors in his work with the UN, put it bluntly when he said of Haideiri, “He was basically an epoxy painter.” Albright reviewed the transcripts of Haideiri’s interview and concluded flatly that he knew nothing about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Once again the Administration’s favorite intelligence fell into the category of “faith-based”. It did not help moreover when the CIA summarily debunked claims from another notoriously unreliable source in the infamous case of the Iraqi attempt to purchase enriched uranium from Niger.
To sum up, in the days leading up to Colen Powell’s revelations before the UN on February 5, 2003, and in the remaining days leading up to the war, virtually all the non-faith-based intelligence at the Whitehouse’s disposal pointed to an Iraqi threat far less significant and far less imminent than Bush and Company wished the country to believe. Why then did they proceed with such urgency toward the precipice of a risky war on the Arab Peninsula?
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