A columnist in Ha'aretz reminds us that we don't yet have the last word on Iraq, weapons of mass destruction and intelligence failures. Things look different to some top intelligence and military officials in Israel.
[S]enior officials, who are intimately familiar with Israeli intelligence material, still believe that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction. Not nuclear weapons, of course. Israel never made this claim. The Americans indeed erred in inflating the insubstantial information on nuclear plans. But there were chemical and biological weapons. And if the Americans have decided otherwise, especially for political reasons, they are now making a second error on top of the first error.Some of these officials have shared their views with their American contacts. "Why didn't we find the weaponry?" the Americans asked. The Israelis told them politely: because most of it was transferred to Syria before the war. Such suspicions have been openly published. All the intelligence services in the West are familiar with photographs of trucks sneaking across the border at night, accompanied by senior Iraqi officers. The problem is that the moment Israel turns an accusatory finger toward Syria, it is immediately suspected of ulterior, political motives. "They can think whatever they want," an Israeli officer says. "Perhaps it is impossible to change their opinion, but it is also impossible to change the truth. Material was transferred to Syria in the dark of the night, on the very eve of the war. Therefore, the Americans did not find it." And this, as suggested above, is the more polite explanation.
The other explanation is expressed in more intimate circles in order to avoid irritating the American friend. But in the course of two weeks, I heard it from three different Israelis who were in positions that had access to intelligence during the war. Some of them are still serving in such positions. "They simply don't know how to search properly," said one.
The lack of clarity about this crucial question, and the Bush administration's willingness to passively allow others to frame the debate, is a lingering mystery.
Stephen F. Hayes has been asking and getting stonewalled.
For the second time in recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers.As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its origins is taking place without crucial information about the former Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's government, much of this information still exists--in handwritten documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and satellite images, on computer hard drives.
The result: Much of today's debate about the threat posed three years ago by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is based on past assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies that we now know had no real sources on the ground in Iraq. The Bush administration seems remarkably uninterested in discovering, now that we have reams of material from Saddam's regime, what the actual terror-related and WMD-related activities of that regime were. But as the political debate of recent weeks makes clear, answering these questions remains central to the debate over the war. More important, it cannot be the case that there's nothing helpful to the ongoing war on terror in these files.
Posted by Alan at December 18, 2005 04:48 PM