The 'intelligence' debate over Saddam's WMDs

By Daniel Henninger

To sustain one's belief in democracy, one has to think that every public debate, no matter the motive, can produce some residue of useful information. As the late aficionado of strategic facts, Albert Wohlstetter, once remarked during a dinner discussion of the global-warming debate, "At least we will learn something about the weather." And so it may be with the argument now over whether George Bush "overstated" Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction to justify the Iraq war.

But before exploring the debatable, a point about what should be obvious. We won't learn the details of Saddam's WMD program until the scientists who worked on it tell us. Mikhail Gorbachev didn't reveal the details of his country's WMD program; the Soviet Union's weapons scientists did.

Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress party told the Journal's editors at our offices this week, as he did others, that he, like many people in Iraq, believes Saddam is alive in the country and directing the attacks on Americans by Baath loyalists. From the AP yesterday: "Anecdotal evidence such as large amounts of cash seized during arrests of militants suggests that someone is paying the militants to attack U.S. troops, said Sgt. Brian Thomas, an Army spokesman in Baghdad."

If you privately ask authoritative U.S. officials about Saddam's disposition, they will say, "We don't know." And despite the war's victory, many Iraqis persist in believing that the U.S., in frustration, will depart before nailing closed every possible window of re-entry for Saddam. Iraq's scientists won't talk unless they believe Saddam is dead and gone. They don't believe that, so in the search for his WMDs, we are on our own.

As to the debate, what exactly is the argument about? Is it about the quality of U.S. intelligence itself (we learned a lot about that on September 11), or is about whether the war in Iraq was justified, or a fraud?

The core of the debate seems to be whether the prewar intelligence estimates meant that Saddam "had" WMDs or whether they "suggested" he had them; or whether Iraq's dual-use technologies (which no one disputes) "could" be diverted to WMD production, rather than "were" in fact being diverted. From this it presumably follows that if Senator Levin's hoped-for "investigation" into the Bush intelligence recommendations found they were suggestive, rather than conclusive, then the war was unjustified. And if this isn't the argument, why are we wasting our time on such casuistry other than for the expectable reasons of petty partisanship? Tony Blair has merely re-established Britain as the pre-eminent European military power, so clearly his own problems with this subject derive from factions that want nothing to do with military power.

We don't have access to those intelligence estimates, but you don't need them to be able to form an intelligent opinion about the basis for invading Iraq. Anyone can do that by visiting the Web site for UNSCOM (http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom), the U.N. inspection force.

In its first report, issued in October 1991, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, UNSCOM's inspectors said: "Conclusive evidence that Iraq was engaged in an advanced military biological research programme has been collected. No evidence of actual weaponization has been found, but the inspections have provided a sound database for future monitoring of biological capabilities in Iraq. Details are given in appendix IV."

Please read the nine other reports on Iraq's WMD program issued under UNSCR 687 until December 1995. And read the eight reports under UNSCR 715 between April 1992 and October 1995; and finally UNSCR 1051's eight reports from April 1996 til October 1999, the year after Saddam kicked the U.N. out of Iraq.

Presumably this mountain of U.N. on-site inspections, in public for any serious person to spend a week reading, may be regarded as a subset of the Bush fraud and fiction now being intimated about the U.S. intelligence estimates. Leaving aside their overwhelming evidence of Saddam's WMD programs, the constant theme across nine years' inspecting is Iraq's unrelenting refusal to cooperate.

That policy of refusal culminated, this past November, in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the one France got from George Bush, with which Saddam also refused to comply. France and Germany then asked for the fifth inspections resolution since the process began back in 1991 when the first team found "conclusive" evidence of an advanced biological weapons program. Instead, we went to war.

The proponents of this current thesis, that the war's basis has damaged U.S. "credibility," are the same people who since 1991 have been willing to move the goal posts constantly downfield for Saddam Hussein, a proven proliferator of WMD who should have been ousted when a premature cease-fire was declared in February 1991, or anytime in 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and in every month that he was up and running - until March 2003. Now he, and his WMD proliferation nightmare are gone. Good.

Specialists have argued for years that the "global community" did not have a system of intelligence gathering and enforcement procedures equal to the threat of WMD proliferation. Even if it did, there remains the classic question that Fred Ikle put to this same global community in 1961 about Soviet arms in an article titled, "After Detection, What?" France offered the answer on Iraq - "nothing."

What North Korea has taught us, as regards nuclear proliferation, is that once a nation's nuclear-reprocessing capability goes critical, military action is virtually impossible. Whatever the policy differences, no serious person disagrees that Saddam going back to the 1980s was using his vast oil revenue and the proliferation network to acquire a radiologic and biological weapons capability. After the documentary evidence of 12 years of inspections, after September 11, the Bush presidency arrived at that thin space for decision which exists before military action becomes impossible. Past that point, you just live with it. Now we don't have to.

Daniel Henninger is the deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.