Iraq Backstory: Josh Marshall on the CIA vs. Chalabi

From an August 2003 Talking Points Memo post :

Bob Drogin article in Thursday's Los Angeles Times put me in the mind of something I came across a year and a half ago when I was researching my first long article on Iraq -- a murky moment from Ahmed Chalabi's past, which played a key role in making him an object of deep distrust and animosity for many at the CIA.

In case you haven't read the earlier posts, Drogin's article says that US intelligence has concluded that a number of defectors with stories about Saddam's WMD programs were probably either double-agents or dupes who unwittingly passed on disinformation from Saddam. (One might also suppose they simply saw the rewards in store for any Iraqi defector who told the Americans what they wanted to hear ...) The piece went on to say that the Agency was applying renewed scrutiny to many of those defectors and implied that that scrutiny would also be applied to the man who was the conduit and handler of many of those defectors: Ahmed Chalabi.

Here's the incident I'm talking about ...

In the Iraq hawks' version of the events of the last dozen years, a key turning point was the failed CIA-backed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996. The coup was run out of Amman, Jordan; it centered on a group of Iraqi army defectors. And it came apart in a particularly humiliating manner: Saddam's agents used the radios the Agency operatives had given the plotters to radio them back and tell them they'd foiled the coup and that the plotters would be executed.

From any perspective it was a pretty low moment.

But, again, back to the Iraq hawks' version of events.

In early 1996 - a few months before the plot unraveled - Chalabi came to Washington to warn the US that the CIA's coup plot had been compromised and should be called off. Chalabi went to Richard Perle - already the eminence grise behind the INC's shadow war in Washington - who arranged a meeting with then-CIA Director John Deutsch, his then-deputy George Tenet, and the CIA's Director of Operations for the Near East, Steve Richter.

According to the INC, Chalabi warned the three of what he had discovered --- that the plot had been compromised. But his warnings went unheeded. That meant the CIA brass was doubly responsible for the plot's eventual failure: Not only was the operation poorly run, but they refused to call it off even when they'd been warned that the plot had been compromised.

In September, a couple months after the coup attempt went bust, Deutsch was called to testify on Capitol Hill about whether Saddam had bested the United States with the thrust into northern Iraq he had just made. (This move back into northern Iraq came after a series of US setback earlier in the year and came after Saddam was able to sow division between the two main Kurdish factions.) Before Deutsch went to testify, Perle went to him and put that earlier meeting to good use, bullying
Deutsch into, in essence, breaking with the administration on Iraq. "Richard Perle got a hold of him and really busted him up," one source familiar with both meetings told me. With the knowledge of the earlier tip-off meeting, this source told me, "Richard had even more ammunition come September."

When Deutsch appeared before the Senate he broke with the administration's position and agreed that Saddam was, in fact stronger, than he had been before the thrust North.

INC sources tell this story as an example of how they used the CIA's incompetence as a tool to advance their own agenda in Washington.

In any case, that's their version of events.

The CIA had a very different take on what had happened with the 1996 coup debacle. Many at the Agency thought that Chalabi, rather than warning that the plot had been compromised, had in fact been the source of the compromise.

The key thing about the 1996 coup attempt, after all, was that it didn't include Chalabi --- but rather the rival umbrella group, the Iraqi National Accord, an assortment of Sunni military defectors. And Chalabi had a history of scuttling anti-Saddam plans that didn't involve him.

Most believed that Chalabi had intentionally compromised the plan, though some thought he might have unwittingly done so or that his group had been infiltrated by Iraqi agents.

Let's make clear that the CIA also wasn't an unbiased observer to all this. The plot had gone south. It was their operation. And they weren't crazy about Chalabi to begin with. It's not unreasonable to question whether these operatives were just looking for a convenient person to blame the whole mess on.
Without all sorts of security clearances, it's almost impossible to judge the basis of their suspicions, though senior people at the Agency implied that their evidence was more than circumstantial.

However that may be, the fact that many folks at the Agency believed Chalabi had leaked word of their plot and gotten a number of US assets executed helps explain why their distrust and animosity toward him runs so deep.

If the CIA is now taking another look at Chalabi's organization, suspecting it may have been infiltrated by or used by Iraqi double-agents, will this earlier incident come in for more attention?

It certainly should be. And given the hostility between the CIA and Chalabi, you'd expect they would if for no other reason than bureaucratic payback.

But according to one former Agency employee, quite the opposite might happen. The CIA, this source told me recently, is in full circle-the-wagons mode. They've got their hands full a) trying to find some WMD and b) investigating why so many points in their pre-war intelligence analysis seemed to be wrong. Looking back to the mid-1990s might drudge up some facts
that would sully Chalabi's reputation. But it would probably bring up many of the Agency's errors too. At the moment, they're trying to keep the self-examination and investigation limited to only the most recent events.

They've already got more problems than they can deal with...

Those silly Europeans

Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, 2003:

American policymakers have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem of Iraq--by taking unilateral and extralegal military action--than they ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Since then, neocon Kagan has hit upon the solution of treating China primarily as a problem, while the rest of us--given the neoconservative stewardship of the size of the Iraq problem--are onto the problem of treating neoconservatism as any kind of a solution.

What do Bush and Iraq have in common?

They both need interventions. Josh Marshall:

...There's a very bleak irony here that's worth noting. Because of the unipolar world we now live in, when anarchy and genocide break out in the world, only the US is really in a position to halt it. I don't mean alone. But rather with other countries acting in concert and probably with some NATO or UN mandate. That was the lesson of the Balkans in the 1990s. Only the US has the mix of military, diplomatic and financial muscle to make it happen. Or did. I don't pretend it would be easy in the middle of Iraq. It might not even be possible. But we're simply not available because as the authors of the catastrophe we simply have no standing or credibility to bring it to a halt. Or even to lead others in doing so. Add to that the fact that the last four years of twiddling our thumbs has sharply depleted our military capacity, diplomatic influence and financial flexibility. It's worth stepping back for a moment and realizing that if we weren't the ones who had started this a lot of us would be calling for the US to intervene to prevent what looks to be coming down the pike. But, as I said, we're not available...

pop prescience

Then you have the nerve to tell me you think that as a mother I'm not fit.
Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites

Harper Valley PTA

[songwriter Tom T. Hall for Jeannie C. Riley, 1968]

You strut around and you flirt with disaster
Never really carin' just what comes after

Golden Country

[songwriter Gary Richrath of REO Speedwagon, 1972]

Vial Mendacity

ob·fus·cate ( P ) Pronunciation Key (bf-skt, b-fskt)
tr.v. ob·fus·cat·ed, ob·fus·cat·ing, ob·fus·cates
1. To make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand: “A great effort was made... to obscure or obfuscate the truth” (Robert Conquest).

2. To render indistinct or dim; darken: The fog obfuscated the shore.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=obfuscation

David Kay, 2 October 2003:

Discussions with Iraqi scientists uncovered agent R&D work that paired overt work with nonpathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents. Examples include: B. Thurengiensis (Bt) with B. anthracis (anthrax), and medicinal plants with ricin. In a similar vein, two key former BW scientists, confirmed that Iraq under the guise of legitimate activity developed refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents. The scientists discussed the development of improved, simplified fermentation and spray drying capabilities for the simulant Bt that would have been directly applicable to anthrax, and one scientist confirmed that the production line for Bt could be switched to produce anthrax in one week if the seed stock were available.

A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002.One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery - hidden in the home of a BW scientist - illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.

Matthew Yglesias, 17 October 2003:

---

EVEN MORE BOTULISM. About a week and a half ago I noted that the botulism discovered by David Kay in an Iraqi scientist's refrigerator -- and since discussed in speeches by the president, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell -- was more hype than threat. Today Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times is on the case with a few more key points:

The single vial of botulinum B had been stored in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen refrigerator since 1993. It appears to have been produced by a nonprofit Virginia biological resource center, the American Type Culture Collection, which legally exported botulinum and other biological material to Iraq under a Commerce Department license in the late 1980s.

. . .

But Dr. David Franz, a former chief U.N. biological weapons inspector who is considered among America's foremost experts on biowarfare agents, said there was no evidence that Iraq or anyone else has ever succeeded in using botulinum B for biowarfare.

"The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," said Franz, who is the former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research.

Long story short: There's no threat here. This raises the question of why, exactly, Kay's team and the gang at the White House are trying to convince people that there is. Politically speaking, obfuscation is an effective strategy on this subject, since it's easy to get confused between the botulinum B bacteria (not dangerous, found in Iraq) and the botulinum A neurotoxin (dangerous, not found in Iraq). I myself made this mistake, but I'm not a biologist and I'm certainly not a biowarfare expert. This tactic -- saying things that are true in such a way as to get people to believe things that are false -- has become a prominent feature of the administration's public relations strategy on a number of fronts and, frankly, it stinks.

--Matthew Yglesias

---

George W. Bush, 3 October 2003:

The report states that Saddam Hussein's regime had a clandestine network of biological laboratories, a live strain of deadly agent botulinum, sophisticated concealment efforts and advanced design work on prohibited longer-range missiles

Richard Cheney, 3 October 2003:

Next item, reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

Colin Powell, 7 October 2003

Lo and behold, Kay and his team found strains of organisms concealed in a scientist's home, and they report that one of the strains could be used to produce biological agents

Press Briefing by Scott McClellan, 6 October 2003

Q The administration is now asking for an additional $600 million. What exactly is the $600 million for? And what will you say to the arguing from some that --

MR. McCLELLAN: We went through this --

Q -- you're throwing good money after bad?

MR. McCLELLAN: We went through this last week. In the wartime supplement, there is a classified section, just like there is any budget appropriation. And I'm not in a position to confirm or deny what's in there, or to get into a position of discussing what's in that classified section. And I'm sure no one in this room wants me to discuss classified information.

Q What about the argument, though, that it would appear to be throwing good money after bad?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me mention that the Iraq survey group does continue to do its work. Dr. Kay pointed out over the weekend a lot of what they have found was not the focus of the initial coverage, and now I think it's important to look at what they have found, as well. Dr. Kay summarized in his report that was made public that -- and I quote that the report discovered what the report calls: dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.

He talked about the strain of botulinum toxin that were found. He talked about -- yesterday, about how a scientist was asked to keep a large amount of anthrax and turned that down. So there's a lot of work that continues. And it's important that the Iraq survey group continue to move forward on its work so that we can uncover the full extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Brad DeLong, 17 December 2003:

I'll stop calling the Bush administration "Orwellian" when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual.

---

[Added to the Iraq Chronicle]

The answer to Helen Thomas's question...

...has already been provided to us by Texas sports biographer Mickey Herskowitz, as Russ Abrams wrote a year and a half ago...

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.”

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work – and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war – has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush’s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters – well before he became president.

In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush’s ghostwriter after Bush’s handlers concluded that the candidate’s views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

Plan A from Outer Space

Josh Marshall's November 26, 2003 post on the firing of Tom Warrick of the State Department's prescient Future of Iraq Project - the government's best expertise shelved to facilitate contemplation of One Giant Cakewalk For Mankind - was put into devastating context by George Packer's extensive November 1993 New Yorker article on the Bush administration's post-war "planning:"

Erdmann’s view that rebuilding Iraq would require a significant, sustained effort was echoed by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Throughout 2002, sixteen groups of Iraqi exiles, coördinated by a bureau official named Thomas S. Warrick, researched potential problems in postwar Iraq, from the electricity grid to the justice system. The thousands of pages that emerged from this effort, which became known as the Future of Iraq Project, presented a sobering view of the country’s physical and human infrastructure—and suggested the need for a long-term, expensive commitment.

The Pentagon also spent time developing a postwar scenario, but, because of Rumsfeld’s battle with Powell over foreign policy, it didn’t coördinate its ideas with the State Department. The planning was directed, in an atmosphere of near-total secrecy, by Douglas J. Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and William Luti, his deputy. According to a Defense Department official, Feith’s team pointedly excluded Pentagon officials with experience in postwar reconstructions. The fear, the official said, was that such people would offer pessimistic scenarios, which would challenge Rumsfeld’s aversion to using troops as peacekeepers; if leaked, these scenarios might dampen public enthusiasm for the war. “You got the impression in this exercise that we didn’t harness the best and brightest minds in a concerted effort,” Thomas E. White, the Secretary of the Army during this period, told me. “With the Department of Defense the first issue was ‘We’ve got to control this thing’—so everyone else was suspect.” White was fired in April. Feith’s team, he said, “had the mind-set that this would be a relatively straightforward, manageable task, because this would be a war of liberation and therefore the reconstruction would be short-lived.”

This was the view held by exiles in the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi. The exiles told President Bush that Iraqis would receive their liberators with “sweets and flowers.” Their advice led policymakers to assume that Iraqi soldiers and policemen would happily transfer their loyalty to the Americans, providing a ready-made security force. “There was a mistaken notion in certain circles in Washington that the Iraqi civil service would remain intact,” Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of the Iraqi Kurdish administration and a strong advocate for the overthrow of Saddam, said. A week before the war, he discussed the problem of law and order with a senior member of the Administration. “They were expecting the police to work after liberation,” Salih told me. “I said, ‘This is not the N.Y.P.D. It’s the Iraqi police. The minute the first cruise missile arrives in Baghdad, the police force degenerates and everybody goes home.’”

In the Pentagon’s scenario, the responsibility of managing Iraq would quickly be handed off to exiles, led by Chalabi—allowing the U.S. to retain control without having to commit more troops and invest a lot of money. “There was a desire by some in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon to cut and run from Iraq and leave it up to Chalabi to run it,” a senior Administration official told me. “The idea was to put our guy in there and he was going to be so compliant that he’d recognize Israel and all the problems in the Middle East would be solved. He would be our man in Baghdad. Everything would be hunky-dory.” The planning was so wishful that it bordered on self-deception. “It isn’t pragmatism, it isn’t Realpolitik, it isn’t conservatism, it isn’t liberalism,” the official said. “It’s theology.”

On January 20th, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive No. 24, which gave control of postwar Iraq to the Department of Defense. At the end of the month, the Pentagon threw together a team of soldiers and civilians, under the leadership of retired General Jay Garner, in the newly christened Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. orha would administer Iraq after the end of hostilities. The war was only seven weeks away.

In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, Garner had led the largely successful effort to save Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. Garner and his inner circle of generals and ambassadors essentially used the same template for the war in Iraq. orha was divided into three “pillars,” as Garner called them: humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration. Garner’s experience in northern Iraq led him to focus on the potential for a humanitarian disaster: displaced populations, starvation, outbreaks of disease, prisoners of war, and, above all, chemical-weapons attacks. The U.N. was warning of the possibility of half a million deaths. orha thoroughly prepared for each of these nightmares—and if any one of them had come to pass Garner’s foresight would have been applauded.

But in concentrating on possible emergencies he failed to consider the long view. On February 21st and 22nd, some two hundred officials gathered in an auditorium at the National Defense University, in Washington, for a “rock drill”—a detailed vetting of the plans that had been made so far. The drill struck some participants as ominous.

“I got the sense that the humanitarian stuff was pretty well in place, but the rest of it was flying blind,” one orha member recalled. “A lot of it was after hearing from Jay Garner, ‘We don’t have any resources to do this.’” Plans for running the country’s ministries were rudimentary; orha had done little research. At Douglas Feith’s insistence, his former law partner Michael Mobbs was named the head of the civil-administration team. According to Garner and others, Mobbs never gelled with his new colleagues. Yet this “pillar” would turn out to be the one that mattered most.

During the rock drill, Gordon W. Rudd, a professor from the Marine Corps’s Command and Staff College, who had been assigned to Garner’s team as a historian, noticed that a man sitting four rows in front of him kept interjecting comments during other people’s presentations. “At first, he annoyed me,” Rudd said. “Then I realized he was better informed than we were. He had worked the topics, while the guy onstage was a rookie.”

It was Tom Warrick, the coördinator of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, and his frustrations had just begun. Two weeks after the rock drill, after a meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld asked Garner, “Do you have a guy named Warrick on your team?” Rumsfeld ordered Garner to remove Warrick from orha, adding, “This came from such a high level I can’t say no.” Warrick, who had done as much thinking about postwar Iraq as any other American official, never went to Baghdad.

The war between State and Defense continues: For months, Feith’s office has held up the appointment of other senior State Department officials to the C.P.A., even as the organization remains fifty per cent understaffed. The reports of the Future of Iraq Project were archived. In Baghdad, I met an Iraqi-American lawyer named Sermid Al-Sarraf, who had served on the project’s transitional-justice working group. He was carrying a copy of its two-hundred-and-fifty-page report, trying to interest C.P.A. officials. Nobody seemed to have read it.

The Administration was remarkably adept at muffling its own internal tensions. On only two occasions did dissenting views become public. The first was on the subject of money: a reporter from the Wall Street Journal quoted Lawrence Lindsey, the President’s chief economic adviser, floating a figure of up to two hundred billion dollars for the war and the reconstruction. This was at odds with the Administration’s projection—stated publicly by Vice-President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz—that the cost of reconstruction would be largely covered by Iraqi oil revenue. By April, the White House had requested only $2.4 billion for postwar rebuilding.

The second rift was over troop deployment. In February, General Eric Shinseki, the Army’s chief of staff, testified before the Senate that the occupation of Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops. This prediction prompted Wolfowitz to get on the phone with Thomas White, the Army Secretary. “He was agitated that we in the Army didn’t get it,” White recalled. “He didn’t give arguments or reasons. Their view was that it was going to go the way they said it was going to go.” Two days later, Wolfowitz appeared before the House Budget Committee and said that so high an estimate was “wildly off the mark.” He explained, “It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his Army. Hard to imagine.”

---

[Added to the Iraq Chronicle]

Iraq Archive

Online Resources

Iraqanalysis.org
Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 Through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions
Brookings Institution:Iraq
C-SPAN Iraq Coverage

Blogs that Discuss Iraq

Back to Iraq 2.0
Daily Howler
Brad DeLong
Political Animal/Kevin Drum
Talking Points Memo/Joshua Micah Marshall
Nouriel Roubini's Global Economics Weblog
MaxSpeak,You Listen!
TAPPED

Debate Chronology/Meta-Narrative

2002

9/7
White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq
An MSNBC article mysteriously taken down recovered by The Memory Hole.
10/22
For Bush, Facts Are Malleable
Dana Milbank enumerates several Bush falsehoods in the Washington Post.
10/25
Dead Parrot Society
Paul Krugman expands on Milbank’s emphasis on Iraq to recapsulate mendacity going back to the election of 2000.
11/6
Malleable Facts
The Dubya Report goes so far as to chart the Bush falsehoods from the Milbank article.

2003

4/17
Where Are Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Brad Delong asks.

4/29
Matters of Emphasis
Paul Krugman on the Bush Administration’s hype of the Iraqi threat.
5/1
All the President’s Lies
Contrasts Bush’s rhetoric with the actual content of his policies.
5/13
The Say-Anything School
EJ Dionne updates Bush Administration misinformation.
5/14
Intelligence Designed
Harold Meyerson details Bush Administration end-runs around bureaucratic channels to derive the desired intelligence product.
5/15
WMD? MIA
David Corn of the Nation decries what he sees as the Bush Administration’s dangerously lackadaisical search for WMD.
6/1
Bush Remarks Confirm Shift in Justifying War
Dana Milbank on Bush’s downshifting claims on Iraq. From the Washington Post.
6/3
The Truth About Bush’s “Lies”
Byron York of the National Review defends Bush.
6/10
Who's Accountable?
Paul Krugman on the failure of the Bush Administration to account for previous claims.
6/19
The Selling of the Iraq War. The First Casualty.
A cumulative accounting of the Bush Administration’s ministrations of intelligence regarding Iraq by Spencer Ackerman and John Judis in The New Republic.
6/24
Denial and Deception
Paul Krugman on the response – or lack thereof – to the Bush Administration’s spin on its case for war.
6/26
Pants on fire...
The Likely Story compiles Bush lies about Iraq.
6/27
Was Bush Lying About WMD?
Fred Kaplan makes a case for misreading of the evidence.
6/29
Is Bush Lying About Iraq?
Orcinus makes a case.
6/30
The War Against Bush
Stephen Hayes of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard responds to the Ackerman/Judis piece.
10/1
Unilateralism Disgraced
In the American Prospect, Ivo H. Daalder of Brookings and James M. Lindsey of the Council on Foreign Relations on Bush's wrong unilateral assumptions on Iraq.
11/17
WAR AFTER THE WAR
George Packer in The New Yorker on the chaos which led to the chaos.

2004

2/8
Vial Mendacity [originally posted at Suite101.com]
8/7
Who Parses the Parsers?
Paul Krugman writes in to Matthew Yglesias.
10/26
Security in Iraq
Ivo Daalder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Max Boot on The Diane Rehm Show.
10/29
Lancet Report 'Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq'
The Lancet study and related links at Iraqanalysis.org

2005

5/1
Blair hit by new leak of secret war plan
London Times reporting on how the war decision preceded justification.

The secret Downing Street memo:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY


DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.


The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.


(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)


MATTHEW RYCROFT

(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)

5/6
British memo indicates Bush made intelligence fit Iraq policy
A Knight Ridder report of Bush administration tailoring of intelligence to fit policy.
11/7
Who Is Lying About Iraq?
Norman Podhoretz writing in Commentary.
11/9
MARKETING THE WAR....
Kevin Drum responds....
11/10
The Case For War
Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics responds.
11/11
President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror
White House transcript:

While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began. (Applause.) Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. And many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: "When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security." That's why more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate -- who had access to the same intelligence -- voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power. (Applause.)

The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges. (Applause.) These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them. (Applause.) Our troops deserve to know that this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. (Applause.) And our troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington, our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for nothing less than victory.(Applause.)

Instapundit:

The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way -- and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it's deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they're acting unpatriotically.

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars?
Brad DeLong:

History Is Written By the Mission Accomplishers - Wonkette:

In a Veteran's Day speech today, Bush came out with the administration's official policy on criticizing the war in Iraq: "While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

Yes. It is. Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

11/12
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus provide Washington Post coverage.
Talking Points Memo
Josh Marshall enumerates talking points of the Bush administration's bad faith on Iraq:

1. Longstanding effort to convince the American people that Iraq maintained ties to al Qaida and may have played a role in 9/11. This was always just a plain old lie. (And if you want to see where the real fights with the Intelligence Community came up, it was always on the terror tie angle and much less on WMD.) The president and his chief advisors tried to leverage Americans' horror over 9/11 to gain support for attacking Iraq. Simple: lying to the public the president was sworn to protect.

2. Repeated efforts to jam purported evidence about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program (the Niger canard) into major presidential speeches despite the fact the CIA believed the claim was not credible and tried to prevent the president from doing so. What's the explanation for that? At best a reckless disregard for the truth in making the case for war to the American public.

3. Consistent and longstanding effort to elide the distinction between chem-bio-weapons (which are terrible but no immediate threat to American security) and nuclear weapons (which are). For better or worse, there was a strong consensus within the foreign policy establishment that Iraq continued to stockpile WMDs. Nor was it an improbable assumption since Saddam had stockpiled and used such weapons before and, by 2002, had been free of on-site weapons inspections for almost four years. But what most observers meant by this was chemical and possibly biological weapons, not nuclear weapons. Big difference! The White House knew that this wasn't enough to get the country into war, so they pushed the threat of a nuclear-armed Saddam for which there was much, much less evidence.

4. The fact that the administration's push for war wasn't even about WMD in the first place. Scarcely a week goes by when I don't get an email from a reader who writes, "I always knew that Saddam didn't have WMDs. How is that you, with all your access and reporting, didn't know that too?" Good question. They were right. And I was wrong. But like many things in this reality-based universe of ours, this was a question subject to empirical inquiry. No one really knew what Saddam was doing between 1998 and 2002. And US intelligence made a lot of very poor assumptions based on sketchy hints and clues. But the solution, at least the first part of it, was to get inspectors in on the ground and actually find out. That is what President Bush's very credible threat of force had done by the Fall of 2002. But once there the inspectors began making pretty steady progress in showing that many of our suspicions about reconstituted WMD programs didn't bear out, the White House response was to begin trying to discredit the inspectors themselves. By early 2003, inspections had shown that there was no serious nuclear weapons effort underway -- the only sort of operation which could have represented a serious or imminent threat. From January of 2003 the administration went to work trying to insure that the war could be started before the rationale for war was entirely discredited. They wanted to create fait accomplis, facts on the ground that no subsequent information or developments could alter. The whole thing was a con. It wasn't about WMD.

11/15
Another Set of Scare Tactics
EJ Dionne:

There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised.

The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.

The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

More:

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

100,000 and not counting

Daniel Davies, who back in November responded to numerous attacks on the Lancet study in the liberal Anglo-American social sciences blog Crooked Timber -

“This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board”. The critique here, from Slate, is that the 95% confidence interval for the estimate of excess deaths (8,000 to 200,000) is so wide that it’s meaningless. It’s wrong. Although there are a lot of numbers between 8,000 and 200,000, one of the ones that isn’t is a little number called zero. That’s quite startling. One might have hoped that there was at least some chance that the Iraq war might have had a positive effect on death rates in Iraq. But the confidence interval from this piece of work suggests that there would be only a 2.5% chance of getting this sort of result from the sample if the true effect of the invasion had been favourable. A curious basis for a humanitarian intervention; “we must invade, because Saddam is killing thousands of his citizens every year, and we will kill only 8,000 more”.

- recently muses over the response:

Les Roberts, the principal author, is going through long dark nights of the soul, wondering if it was a tactical mistake to request accelerated peer review and to have been so vocal about the US elections (btw, the Chronicle reiterates the point we made here earlier; that accelerated peer review is uncommon but by no means unknown with important papers). The Lancet editor Richard Horton refuses to comment, and well he might given that he wrote an entirely misleading summary of the paper which referred to “100,000 civilian deaths” when the paper did not make this distinction.

But there is no way on earth that I am going to write a comment harping on about this or that minor faux pas on the part of the authors.

Because the fundamental point that Roberts makes in the article is absolutely correct; it is a far greater disgrace that 100,000 people can be needlessly killed and everybody carries on as they were before. You don’t have to accept an entirely consequentialist view of wars to accept that the consequences of wars have to be relevant to assessing whether they’ve succeeded or not. The best evidence that we have is that the consequences of this one were bloody disastrous.

...And links to a new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education which documents how rushing the study to print has ironically sunk rather than augmented its impact:

In late October, a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.

The paper, written by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University, was based on a door-to-door survey in September of nearly 8,000 people in 33 randomly selected locations in Iraq. It was dangerous work, and the team of researchers was lucky to emerge from the survey unharmed.

The paper that they published carried some caveats. For instance, the researchers admitted that many of the dead might have been combatants. They also acknowledged that the true number of deaths could fall anywhere within a range of 8,000 to 194,000, a function of the researchers' having extrapolated their survey to a country of 25 million.

But the statistics do point to a number in the middle of that range. And the raw numbers upon which the researchers' extrapolation was based are undeniable: Since the invasion, the No. 1 cause of death among households surveyed was violence. The risk of death due to violence had increased 58-fold since before the war. And more than half of the people who had died from violence and its aftermath since the invasion began were women and children.

Neither the Defense Department nor the State Department responded to the paper, nor would they comment when contacted by The Chronicle. American news-media outlets largely published only short articles, noting how much higher the Lancet estimate was than previous estimates. Some pundits called the results politicized and worthless.

Les F. Roberts, a research associate at Hopkins and the lead author of the paper, was shocked by the muted or dismissive reception. He had expected the public response to his paper to be "moral outrage."

On its merits, the study should have received more prominent play. Public-health professionals have uniformly praised the paper for its correct methods and notable results.

"Les has used, and consistently uses, the best possible methodology," says Bradley A. Woodruff, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Indeed, the United Nations and the State Department have cited mortality numbers compiled by Mr. Roberts on previous conflicts as fact -- and have acted on those results.

What went wrong this time? Perhaps the rush by researchers and The Lancet to put the study in front of American voters before the election accomplished precisely the opposite result, drowning out a valuable study in the clamor of the presidential campaign.

The Sign of the Seal.

While Josh says Game. Set. Match., Laura Rozen, who has pictures, says The Sign of The Seal is flashing Game Over:

Game over.

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

Independent experts said several other factors - the geography; the number of bunkers; the seals on some of the bunker doors; the boxes, crates and barrels similar to those seen by weapon inspectors - confirm that the videotape was taken at Al Qaqaa.

"There's not another place that you would mistake it for," said Dean Staley, the KSTP reporter, who now works in Seattle.

The accidental news encounter began last year after the invasion, Mr. Staley recalled in an interview. Their Army unit arrived in the region on Friday, April 11, and made camp. The Fifth Battalion of the 101st Airborne's 159th Aviation Brigade flew helicopter missions from the camp in the Iraqi desert, moving troops and supplies to the front.

A week later, on Friday, April 18, two journalists recalled, they joined two soldiers who were driving in a Humvee to investigate the nearby bunkers. Among other things, wandering inside the cavernous buildings offered the prospect of relief from the desert sun.

"It was just by chance that we were able to go," said Joe Caffrey, the team's photographer. "They wanted to go out and we asked to tag along."

Mr. Caffrey provided The New York Times with the latitude and longitude of the camp, which places it between 1.5 and 3 miles southeast of Al Qaqaa bunkers. A commercial satellite photograph of the region shows that the camp was close to the storage site. Mr. Caffrey said the soldiers used bolt cutters to cut through chains with locks on them, as well as seals. He said the seals appeared to be lead disks attached to very thin wires that were wrapped around the doors of the bunker entrances, forming a barrier easily cut in two.

They visited a half dozen bunkers, he said. The gloomy interiors revealed long rows of boxes, crates and barrels, what independent experts said were three kinds of HMX containers shipped to Iraq from France, China and Yugoslavia.

The team opened storage containers, some of which contained white powder that independent experts said was consistent with HMX.

"The soldiers were pretty much in awe of what they were seeing," Mr. Caffrey recalled. "They were saying their E.O.D. - Explosive Ordinance Division, people who blow this kind of stuff up - would have a field day."

Here's more from KSTP showing the IAEA seals.

Those in denial need to find a new preoccupation. It was HMX and it went missing after the US should have been securing such sites.





Posted by Laura at October 28, 2004 11:41 PM

Tons more evidence of the mishandled occupation.

From Joshua Micah Marshall's excellent coverage of the al Qa Qaa Affair...

[ Where is Thomas Warrick these days, anyway? ]

Difficulties keeping the story straight.

In this article filed today by the AFP, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita suggests that the explosives at al Qa Qaa may have disappeared even before American troops arrived on the scene.

"We do not know when -- if those weapons did exist at that facility -- they were last seen, and under whose control they were last in ... It's very possible -- certainly it's plausible -- that it was the Saddam Hussein regime that last had control of these things."

Di Rita went on to say that it is not clear whether the explosives were at the facility when US troops did their initial searches of the place for weapons of mass destruction and related materials.

But another Pentagon official who spoke to the Associated Press seems to disagree ...

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sad.