Where are the Iraqi WMD?

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

This article on the Sunday front page of the Washington Post is very disturbing.

The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

The specialized teams will be gone in a month (assuming things remain the way they are) and they have found squat.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.

Why? Perhaps it's due to the looting and vandalism.

At nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall from power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44 of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the 372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.

McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone."

Also, it is now obvious there were intelligence failures, both in the analysis and distribution.

Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear sites under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not reach the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did not know mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a far less accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants believed at the outset of their search, they recalled.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were there. The assessments were solid."

THAT is going to sting some pro-war folks and it already stings me. So much has been made of the overwhelming evidence that the US claimed to have that I'd say many of us took it on faith. That evidence and intel is now directly suspect, though perhaps at the time it was relevant. We won't know for a while. In the meantime, we end up looking bad.

The "not enough forces" debate will flare up again and this time the pro-war people must acknowledge that regardless of whatever genius (or not) basis the original plan was concieved upon, the forces there were simply trying to do too much with too little. Fight the war. Hunt for leaders. Protect civil infrastructure and the peace after the front line moves on. Help with humanitarian aid. Search for weapons of mass destruction. This is a failure and it needs to be acknowledged, principally because it was a failure that could have been easily prevented at the outset, either by starting the troop buildup earlier or waiting for the 4th Infantry Division to deploy before crossing the Kuwati border.

Essentially, this failure to find WMD reflects very badly (in my opinion) on the planning and intelligence side of the Bush administration. After all has been said and done to this point, it mislead us to a degree and then was too incompetent to eliminate two of the larger and obvious potential roadblocks to finding the WMDs: enough forces to effectively neutralize any threats to site integrity and accurate and timely intel. Of course, there may have been the discoveries we were expecting and perhaps they are being kept under wraps to be revealed later. There would have to be a powerful strategic or tactical incentive to do that before I agree with it.

I still believe we will find some direct and incontrovertible proof of Saddam's programs and the weapons themselves. I also believe that there is a lot more to look at in Iraq and by no means has the search combed a majority of the land in the country. Part of my support for the war on Iraq was based on these WMD. The larger part is based on the idea that this is an important secondary (Afghanistan being the primary and initial) step in the context of a larger war on terrorism. But this is an ugly, ugly black eye for Bush and I won't forget about it.

Posted by Drizzten at May 11, 2003 11:06 AM