CIAO DATE: 04/05

Unproven: The Controversy over Justifying War in Iraq

Abstract

The failure of U.S. and British forces in Iraq to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction has sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and in the wider international community. Two contending explanations have been offered for why the Bush administration made apparently questionable claims about weapons of mass destruction. The first alleges an intelligence failure. The best analysts in the CIA simply had no foolproof way of discerning what Saddam had. They gave the administration a wide-ranging set of estimates, from benign to worst-case, and, given the way bureaucracies behave, the president's advisors adopted the worse case scenario. The second claim, more odious in form and substance, is that the administration inflated and manipulated uncertain data, possibly even requesting that material sent to it be redone to fit preconceived notions. The Bush administration has gone to great pains to reassert that it stands by its previous pronouncements that prohibited weapons will be located in due time.

Testing the merits of these explanations and sorting through the various issues involved are important matters. But there is another question that needs to be asked. Why was so much publicly available information on Iraq's weapons programs systematically ignored in the months preceding the war? Part of the answer may lie in the determination of Washington and London to confirm the image, drawn mostly from the late 1980s and early 1990s, of a regime armed to the teeth. As a result intelligence analysts and especially members of the administration consistently failed to consider three important factors in analyzing the scope of Iraqi weapons holdings.

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