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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Jonathan B. Tucker, a former United Nations biological weapons inspector in Iraq (1995), is currently on leave from Monterey Institute of International Studies as a visiting senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His last book was "Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox."
He laid out a lot of evidence that cumulatively made a strong case that Iraq is not cooperating fully with the inspection process but I don't think he made the case that Iraq poses an imminent threat that would warrant a preemptive war and regime change.
Another troubling subtext of the presentation was that the U.S. government possessed intelligence -- for example, the satellite images of decontamination trucks carting away prohibited materials from weapons sites -- that would have been of great value to the inspectors had it been made available. I noticed that Hans Blix often appeared extremely angry and I think that might have been the reason -- not only that Iraq was pulling the wool over his eyes, but that the U.S. had actionable intelligence while the inspectors were in the country and did not make it available. I think this was because there was resistance from the intelligence community to declassify information and strong elements of the administration that did not want inspections to succeed -- the hawks who saw the inspections as a sideshow.
Saddam appears to have limited numbers of Scud missiles and perhaps some unmanned aerial vehicles that could disseminate agents but they are short range systems that do not pose a direct threat to the U.S. They pose threats to his neighbors. If Saddam were to attack Israel then he would probably face nuclear retaliation. He knows his fate would be sealed.
The irony is that the CIA did an assessment last October in which it assessed that the most likely circumstances under which Saddam would provide weapons to terrorists is if we invade. The main threat to the U.S. is through terrorist proxies but it doesn't seem likely he would do that. I see all this more as a challenge to the authority of the Security Council than to U.S. security. If the U.S. were to go it alone, we would make the Security Council irrelevant and eliminate its effectiveness with dealing with international conflict. If we set the example that we can go to war preemptively, it's a prescription for chaos and anarchy.
Peter Bergen, author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden"
I was more or less convinced [by what Powell said about an al-Qaida presence in Iraq], but there wasn't a vast amount of new material. We knew [al-Qaida leader Abu Musab] Zarqawi had been implicated in the killing of [U.S. diplomat] Lawrence Foley. It doesn't change my general feeling that Zarqawi was not in division A of al-Qaida. He's still in division B. He's not on the FBI's most wanted list. To make him out to be a major figure is sort of misleading.
There were two new things. One was the suggestion that Zarqawi has a network of lieutenants implicated in these rashes of attempted chemical weapons attacks from England to Spain. And certainly it would be new if there were two dozen al-Qaida affiliates in Baghdad, but affiliates is a kind of weasel word. It can mean lots of different things.
Another substantive thing about the presentation is how this intelligence is gathered. The whole presentation was obviously supported by telephone intercepts and satellite pictures. That was not the case in the al-Qaida section. You had to trust what he said about intelligence sources. But he's a fairly credible figure. Do the thought experiment where Dick Cheney was presenting it; obviously Powell was the right person to do this presentation.
As for the information that Iraqi agents made a nonaggression pact with Osama bin Laden, I'm not entirely sure what that means. It seems to undercut one of their arguments. Why would they be signing a nonaggression agreement if they were close friends? You don't sign nonaggression pacts with people you're doing business with. It cuts both ways.
One of the things that did leap out at me was what Powell said about how Iraqis were linked to terrorism throughout the '90s. The State Department's own reports sabotage the view that Iraq is involved in anti-Western terrorism. Every year the U.S. State Department releases an authoritative survey of global terrorism. According to its 2000 report: Iraq "has not attempted an anti-western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait". Even after Sept. 11 the heaviest charge made in the state department's subsequent report was pretty mild: "Iraq was the only Arab-Muslim country that did not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States." So this stuff is of very recent vintage.
