Source: Carnegie

The new reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee and the United Kingdom's parliamentary inquiry by Lord Butler offer devastating critiques of both nations' intelligence failures in Iraq. With access to the classified record and interviews with hundreds of intelligence analysts and operatives, these reports discuss in striking detail how the intelligence community misrepresented and misjudged information about Iraq's suspected nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. Public documents and statements by officials in both countries used these faulty intelligence findings to argue, as Prime Minister Blair said in his foreword to the British dossier, "It is now clear . . . the policy of containment has not worked," and, thus, war was necessary.

We now know with a high degree of certainty:

a.. Iraq did not have significant quantities of chemical or biological weapons.
b.. Iraq did not have on-going chemical, biological or nuclear weapon programs.
c.. Iraq did not pose an immediate threat to the United States, Europe or the region.
d.. None of the key findings in either the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq or the British Dossier on Iraq were accurate, with the exception of the findings that Saddam was highly unlikely to transfer any weapons to terrorist groups (U.S.) and that there was no evidence of operational ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda (UK).
e.. Officials in both the UK and the U.S. went far beyond the intelligence findings in their public statements.
Others came to these conclusions months ago without classified access: Spencer Ackerman and John Judis of the New Republic, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, and Jessica Mathews, George Perkovich and ourselves at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The fact that these errors were apparent months ago - and for some, before the war - suggests how seriously damaged the intelligence process has become. Because the estimates were so deeply flawed and the consequences so enormously costly, it is crucial to examine the role of the White House and 10 Downing Street in what is arguably one of the worst intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor.

System Failure or Sudden Shift?

The Senate intelligence report concludes that the failures were a result of "systematic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection" and a "group think" mentality-rather than administration pressure. Similarly, the Butler report blamed the analysts and the system rather than fault political or organizational leaders. This would suggest that the assessments began to diverge from reality immediately after inspections ended in 1998. The truth is that the U.S. unclassified assessments offered fairly reasonable judgements until 2002, when the CIA released the October 2002 NIE. In brief, the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies in early 2002 was that:

a.. The 1991 Gulf War, UN inspections, and subsequent military actions had destroyed most of Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile capacity.
b.. There was no direct evidence that any chemical or biological weapons remained in Iraq, but agencies judged that some stocks could still remain and that production could be renewed.
c.. As Iraq rebuilt its facilities, some of the equipment purchased for civilian use could also be used to manufacture chemical or biological weapons.
d.. Without an inspection regime, it was very difficult to determine the status of these programs.
A marked shift, however, occurred with the October NIE. The findings became far more dramatic, specific and certain. The NIE judged that Iraq had 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons "much of it added in the last year," that "all key aspects . . . of Iraq's offensive biological weapons (BW) program are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than the were before the Gulf War," that Iraq had "a covert force of up to a few dozen Scud-variant ballistic missiles" and "a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas," and that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear program."

Why, if the error was the intelligence community's "systematic weakness" alone, did the assessments shift so rapidly in 2002? In this context, the Senate and Butler Committees' explanation for intelligence flaws appears astonishingly incomplete.

Pressure from the Top

The dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 NIE suggests, but does not prove, that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002. Although such situations are not unusual, in this case, the pressure appears to have been unusually intense. This is indicated by the Vice President's repeated visits to CIA headquarters and demands by officials for access to the raw intelligence from which analysts were working. Also notable is the unusual speed with which the NIE was written and the high number of dissents in what is designed to be a consensus document. Finally, there is the fact that political appointees in the Department of Defense set up their own intelligence operation reportedly out of dissatisfaction with the caveated judgments being reached by intelligence professionals. It strains credulity to believe that together these five aspects of the process did not create an environment in which individuals and agencies felt pressured to reach more threatening judgments of Saddam Hussein's weapon programs than many analysts felt were warranted.

In the Senate report, the committee's definition of "pressure" might have been too narrow to catch potential sources of coercion. As Senator Rockefeller remarked, CIA Director George Tenet, former CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr, and the ombudsman of the CIA all reported evidence of pressure on intelligence analysts. Rockefeller continued:

" Plus the fact that all during this time in advance of the intelligence that he was getting, the president and his top administrators . . . Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz -- they were putting out these hair- raising, paralyzing, horrifying statements about what was going to happen, because it was about to come back to the homeland, the mushroom cloud. This is pressure, folks. This is pressure."

Moreover, administration officials misrepresented the threat from Iraq's weapons far beyond the intelligence failures. Administration officials and documents dropped the caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements. As Lord Butler gently puts it in one of his report's great understatements: "Language in the dossier may have left with readers the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgements than was the case." The administration also contradicted the intelligence finding that the CIA got right when it treated as a given truth that Saddam Hussein would give whatever weapons he possessed to terrorists and that the regime had a direct relationship with Al Qaeda.

We Were Not All Wrong

President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, Senator Pat Roberts and others assert that everyone - including the United Nations - got it wrong. The United Nations inspectors never said, however, that Iraq had nuclear, biological or chemical weapons-only that Iraq might have some components or materials for such weapons. As Hans Blix told the Security Council one month before the war, "One must not jump to the conclusion that they exist." They needed the inspections to know for sure.

This point is key. The administration and many experts ignored the new intelligence coming in from the UN inspectors during the three months they were allowed to operate. The Butler report notes the failure of the British government to "re-evaluate" its intelligence estimates in light of the inspectors' findings in 2003. The inspectors reported back that there was no evidence of the large-scale, on-going production programs the U.S. and UK claimed. The inspectors said they would have needed only a few more months to give definitive answers. Many experts, including several at the Carnegie Endowment, urged the president to continue inspections and containment. We now know that these measures were working, that Saddam was growing weaker, not stronger, that his army was deteriorating and his rule shaky.

If the United States and the United Kingdom are to reform the intelligence assessment process to better respond to future threats, it is essential that top policymakers understand that the work is only half finished. A true, comprehensive assessment of the intelligence failures prior to the Iraq war, including the administration's role, is still needed-regardless of political schedules. It can be done now, in great part relying on open sources. If it proves impossible during the current administration, than it must become the task of the next.

Joseph Cirincione is director for nonproliferation and Alexis Orton is a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Both are co-authors of WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (January 2004).