David Kay spoke at Harvard in March on how Intelligence Failure, not Deception, led to war. He covered some ground that I omitted in my Observer article on his May 4 talk at the University of Virginia. At Harvard, the for U.S. weapons inspector covered this point:
"Instead of having those weapons, Kay said, Hussein behaved as if he did in order to suppress domestic enemies among the Kurds in the north, whom Hussein had gassed, and the Shiites in the south, whom Hussein had brutalized when they rose up in Basra.
...
"What we failed to see is that consistency of behavior is not the same as consistency for the reasons behind the behavior," Kay said. "His rationale changed and we missed it."
...
In addition to misinterpreting Saddam Hussein's behavior, Kay said the United States and other Western nations missed the disintegration of Iraq's society, both of its physical infrastructure and of its ability to function normally, due to fear, poverty, and corruption. Iraq wasn't capable at that stage, Kay said, of launching a major arms program."
This point reinforces a contention that I made in my February 3 letter to the Washington Post. If the intelligence community had performed a thoroughgoing analysis of Iraqi weapons industry and programs, it would have known that there was minimal WMD threat - at least from the military. (There was no way to exclude the possibity of a small scale terrorist attack. After 9/11 even a small scale attack might have been devastating.)
After the first Gulf War, the intelligence community greatly reduced its capablity to follow weapons development. This is because leadership emphasized the need for greater emphasis on tactical intelligence in support of the troops.
Come to think of it, I'm starting to sound a little bit like that (in)famous former intelligence officer (Richard Clarke) who is busy saying "I told you so - but you didn't listen".
Comments