As appears in La Opinion, November 27,2005

George A. Lopez

Once it became clear that no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, the Bush Administration began portraying themselves as unwitting victims of defective intelligence about Saddam Hussein's arsenal. As charges of Administration manipulation of that intelligence emerged in Congress and with poll numbers sagging, the White House has initiated a new, aggressive strategy about pre-war intelligence.

The Administration now asserts that Congress, our allies, their security agencies, and the American people all looked at exactly the same intelligence data. Thus, the White House claims, we all reached the same judgment about Iraq's weapons and the need to remove them by force. This logical leap then permits the Administration to attack as irresponsible for rewriting history those who assert they were misled by the President.

If revisionism is rampant in Washington, then much like the data about Iraqi weapons presented to Americans before the war, the White House leads the way.

Beginning in early 2002, the Administration chose its own particular path of weapons data acquisition and validation. Aided by security think tanks which shared its woridview, the White House searched for studies, defector testimony, data extrapolation, and reasonable conjecture which would portray an Iraq laden with weapons.

Because Saddam had evaded any serious investigation for four years, there clearly was sufficient concern, uncertainties, and diverse data within governmental intelligence agencies to suspect that he still held some WMD material. But just how much material, or the extent of its real shelf-life (especially in the chemical and biological area), or whether what might be available could be deliverable in war, was in honest dispute, both within and outside government.

For its part the While House chose to use mostly older and worst case weapons data, often from the early nineties, along with intelligence guesstimates, as the core of its own information base. Critical to the success of their approach was casting a disparaging eye toward arty data about weapons degradation, or doubts about Iraq's real capabilities, that might have resumed from the success of the United Nations inspections and sanctions process imposed on Iraq since 1991. Because this castigation and dismissal of UN reports fit the Administration’s pattern of general disdain for and distrust of the UN, few Washington defense analysis questioned it.

The result of the White House's strategy meant that neither verifiable and redundant "on the plus side" data about the interdiction of prohibited goods and weapons materiel via sanctions, nor the documented destruction of Iraq's WMD materials and production facilities via inspections (1991 to 1998) found its way into Administration calculations of Iraqi capability.

The intelligence and policy establishments found themselves caught in a 'group-think' system which validated only the information that the White House suspected to be true. In response, they appeared unwilling or unable to discount their analyses of what weapons Iraq probably or might have possessed by what they knew was captured, destroyed or degraded as a result of US and UN action in the 1990s.

Reasonable proof about there being few and deteriorating Iraqi WMDs was readily available for those who sought such argumentation. The many UN reports on weapons dismantlement and sanctions, the British Joint Intelligence Committee report of September 2GG2, some of the State Departments and CIA's own assessments, as well as research articles from think tanks and university faculty in the US and Europe, provided ample documentation of the effective degrading of Iraq's weapons programs and skepticism about weapons programs in any operational sense. Some analysts even questioned how biological and chemical agents suspected to exist in Iraq in1998 could stilt be weapons grade material by 2003.

Why did these studies make no difference in the march to war? Because more than manipulating the data, the White House astutely manipulated the intelligence and policy communities (not TO mention the press) with a masterful salesmanship that calculated Saddam's swagger and intentions as comprising his real capabilities. In so doing, the Bush Administration left no question about what types of information would be regarded as credible and policy relevant and which would be dismissed.

The Administration's determined strategy worked superbly. As in the celebrated case of intercepted aluminum tubes in 2002, the While House focused on Iraq's attempts to smuggle material as the persuasive story, not on how the sanctions had thwarted the effort. Rather than bolstering the case for sanctions or inspections effectiveness, the greater the amount of prohibited Items interdicted or destroyed, the more the US characterized the UN program as a failure.

Were the results not so tragic, the Bush interpretation of these policy successes and their meaning could be considered comical. For inspectors to find and destroy WMD material meant that Saddam had a growing supply of weapons. Not to find material meant that Saddam had amassed more weapons and had unparalleled skill in hiding them.

As the White House moved to sell the war, every inconsistency between Administration claims regarding Iraqi weapons and other available information seemed to be resolved in favor of the Bush team. President Bush said in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002 that aerial photos of the former Tuwaitha nuclear weapons complex "reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past." Soon after this, Vice President Cheney claimed "we know [the weapons] are there."

Between December, 2002 and February, 2003 UN inspectors visited Tuwaitha numerous times and found no signs of nuclear activity at any of these sites. Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix reported how and why hundreds of unimpeded visits to Iraq had turned up no alleged stockpiles or prohibited weapons.

When National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice evoked images of a nuclear mushroom cloud, UN atomic agency head Mohammed el Baradei stated flatly: "After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq."

But Bush, Cheney and Rice carried the day.

The now discredited presentation of Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 constitutes the most discouraging case. Powell claimed Iraq held or hid a number of prohibited materials including specialized aluminum tubes, vacuum tubes, a magnet production line, a large filament winding machine, fluorine gas, and other goods with nuclear weapons-related applications. And he offered artwork power point slides of the "Winnebagos of death" used by Iraq as mobile bio-weapons labs.

Within hours of his speech various scientific and policy groups were publishing or web posting how and where most of the products cited by Powell had already been captured in the sanctions and inspections net or were not WMD goods. Despite these refutations, Powell's testimony served as the springboard for war.

In convincing the world that Iraq was a WMD menace, the White House purposefully and systematically ignored the accomplishments of a US led international policy which had already decimated Saddam's weapons systems. From start to finish - unquestionably - this was a White House led war. About that reality there can be no revisionism.

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George A. Lopez is a senior fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

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