Stephen L. Carter
Bloomberg
2/3/2013
…Corera offers a nuanced perspective that should serve as corrective to some of the sillier conspiracy theories that still abound. His account is unlikely to convince all the doubters, but should be studied nonetheless for the lessons it carries — lessons to which President Barack Obama and his administration should pay close attention.
Corera has combed available public sources, both official investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”
By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Group that found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush and Blair were just along for the ride.
The myth of the super-weapons, once it gained currency, could not be dispelled. Saddam’s penchant for secrecy only made matters worse: “Every general knew he did not have the special weapons but thought his counterpart down the road did.” Even in the absence of a conspiracy, the widespread belief in Iraqi duplicity created a situation in which Saddam was unable to prove a negative: “The bar for intelligence that suggested there were no weapons was far higher than for any evidence of their existence.”…
…Overall, Corera agrees with the conclusion of the British investigators: With a single exception, the intelligence wasn’t spun by the politicians. It was “simply wrong.” From the point of view of the spies, he points out, this realization is far more damaging. It means they didn’t do their jobs. And the political leaders, says Corera, “believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”…
Read the entire article at Bloomberg.