Duelfer's WMD report

When I saw the first reporting on Duelfer's report, my immediate reaction was "BS". There's no way that Sadaam had no WMD after 1991. After all, in 1995 Sadaam's son-in-law defected and revealed his stockpiles to the world, forcing Sadaam to declare them to the UN in a 12,000 page document.

In 1998, our State Department, under the Clinton administration, produced a white paper detailing the current, known state of Iraqi weapons programs. It includes a strikingly accurate (in light of what we know now) assessment of the Iraqi weapons programs. (Emphasis mine.)

On the basis of the last seven years' experience, the world's experts conclude that enough production components and data remain hidden and enough expertise has been retained or developed to enable Iraq to resume development and production of WMD. They believe Iraq maintains a small force of Scud-type missiles, a small stockpile of chemical and biological munitions, and the capability to quickly resurrect biological and chemical weapons production.

This is almost verbatim what we know now to be true. Note particularly the reference to "resum[ing] development and production", an indication that the intelligence at the time was that he was not producing weapons during the seven year period for 1991 to 1998. This is precisely the point that Duelfer makes in his report, but you wouldn't know that from the press coverage. (Of course we couldn't know if Sadaam was developing and producing weapons after 1998, because he kicked the UN inspectors out. Thus the raison d'etre for the war - or causus belli as the elite are so found of saying.)

So I thought if the press reports are accurate (and that's an if as big as the Grand Canyon), then Duelfer did a lousy job.

Now Fox News has released a report that provides a completely different view of the report. This is the lead paragraph of the story. (Emphasis mine.)

The chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq has found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction production by Saddam Hussein's regime after 1991.

That is miles apart from the "no WMD" chant of the screaming nitwits, isn't it?

Just because Iraq wasn't producing new weapons does not mean they had no weapons. In fact we know that they did because Sadaam's son-in-law paid with his life for revealing them in 1995.

One of the best expositions of the evidence of WMD is a heavily footnoted treatise on the subject, but Australian professor, Dr. Paul Monk.

In another article, "Iraq and Intelligence: Surprise, Surprise", Dr. Monk writes

There is a scene in Pearl Harbor in which the Chief of Naval Operations confronts a senior intelligence analyst who fears that the Japanese could be about to attack the great portage. What's your hard evidence? he is asked. "If we had hard evidence, sir, we'd be at war," is the reply. "So you'd have me mobilize the entire fleet, at a cost of millions of dollars, based on this spine-tingling feeling of yours," the CNO challenges him. "No, sir," says the intelligence analyst. "I understand my job is to gather and interpret material. Making difficult decisions, based on incomplete information from my limited decoding ability is your job."

I like that scene. It rather neatly encapsulates both the challenges of intelligence analysis and the responsibilities of analysts compared with policy makers. We all have a stake in both doing their jobs as well as possible. We all too easily underestimate the difficulties they face in attempting to do so. We also tend to overestimate our own grasp of the ways they work and the grounds on which they make their judgments.

What the official inquiries into the decision for war in Iraq have shown is the fallibility of such judgments. Well, surprise, surprise. Just beware of your own fallible judgment, though, in denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard, or their intelligence agencies, for making errors of a kind you surely don't make. There is plenty of scope for improving our judgments in matters great and small. Let's concentrate on that, rather than on scapegoating, posturing or political point-scoring.

This underscores the obvious tension between the 9/11 Commission's report, which says that our intelligence agencies 'failed to connect the dots", and the Senate Intelligence Committe Report, which says our intelligence agencies were "connecting dots that weren't there".

Now, for political reasons, the left is refusing to connect the dots in an obvious politicization of an issue that affects the security of every one of us. Instead of searching for the WMD, we're being told there never were any, even though the evidence that there were is overwhelming.

Some day, this pigheaded stubborness may come back to haunt us, when terrorists, who would have ready access to the weapons if they are in Syria, use them to slaughter thousands of innocent citizens (America or otherwise). Their blood will be on the hands of the left, but the left will surely try to deflect the blame to the "failed policies" of whatever administration has the unfortunate timing to be in power when it happens.