If you like Iraq, you'll love Iran

Kenneth Pollack says the Bush administration doesn't have a clue about what to do in Iran and doesn't have much time to get it right.

By Jeff Horwitz

Dec 22, 2004 | For critics of the invasion of Iraq, the name Kenneth Pollack conjures bad memories of the boneheaded intelligence that got us into the disastrous sand trap. In his 2002 book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," Pollack, a former CIA analyst who had served as the National Security Council's director of Persian Gulf affairs under Bill Clinton, concluded that Saddam Hussein was in all likelihood developing a nuclear weapon. Bush administration hawks were quick to seize on his work as they built their case for invasion, but Pollack was far from a neocon zealot. In his new book, "The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America," Pollack arrives at a far more dovish conclusion. He argues that coordinated pressure from the United States and Europe is the best strategy to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

Benefiting from the author's background in intelligence, "The Persian Puzzle" is a meticulous and important analysis of how American-Iranian relations have failed consistently since 1953, the year the CIA stumbled into Iran's postcolonial mess and engineered a coup. Salon spoke with Pollack by phone from his office at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

You were a main figure in Persian Gulf intelligence operations in the 1990s. How did we get Iraq's intentions and capabilities so wrong?

Well, I wouldn't say we got anything wrong on the intention side. I think we got it absolutely right. I look back at the chapters I wrote in "The Threatening Storm" about what Saddam was thinking and I think everything we've seen since the invasion confirms Saddam's intentions. If he ever got a nuclear weapon, we'd be in a great deal of trouble -- that was a game we simply didn't want to play.

The problem was, we got his capabilities absolutely wrong. One reason for that was that the intelligence community had gotten Iraq's nuclear problem wrong in 1991. In the '80s, we believed Iraq's nuclear program was really primitive. We only found out after the Persian Gulf War that the Iraqis were much closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon than anyone ever thought. That created a mindset in the intelligence community that the Iraqis are hell-bent on developing these weapons, they are very good at covering their tracks, and every time we catch them, they're further along than we expect. And that was reinforced between 1994 and 1996, when a number of high-ranking Iraqi officials defected and we suddenly learn the Iraqis were cheating.

Another issue was Saddam's bizarre behavior. In the 1997-1998 time frame, he had given up most of his WMD program and he'd destroyed his stockpiles. He expected that this would get the sanctions lifted. Well, if you want the sanctions lifted, genius, when you destroy your WMD, tell everyone! But instead, he became even more aggressive in resisting the inspections.

Would we have caught these mistakes if we hadn't rushed into war?

Look, I was all for going slower, and I said that at the time. I never thought we needed to go to war in 2003. Of course, I wanted to wait longer for a whole variety of other reasons, diplomatic, economic, political, all those other reasons that are coming home to haunt us. But I think we might have gotten a better intelligence picture had we not rushed to war.

Of course, the neocons wanted to go to war for a whole variety of reasons, and as Paul Wolfowitz said, they just latched on to the WMD threat because it was the one thing that everyone agreed on. It's hard to imagine how you could have derailed that train -- after Afghanistan, they absolutely believed you could fight wars quickly and cheaply without much effort in the reconstruction phase. They believed Saddam was the source of all evil in the Middle East, and they really did believe that he was in bed with al-Qaida even though there was no evidence of that. They just believed these things.

I'm not convinced that a perfectly accurate picture of Iraqi WMD would have changed the march to war at all. Certainly it would have convinced me; and a lot of other people in my category probably would have fallen off. But do you honestly believe that me and Joe Biden and David Remnick could have stopped President Bush from going to war with Iraq? I don't.

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