Weapons Of Mass Destruction In Iraq Research Articles

Cheater's Dilemma: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Path to War

Between the 1991 Gulf War and the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the Iraqi regime faced a cheater's dilemma: how much should it reveal of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities when each additional revelation made it less likely that the country would be rewarded, while continued denial also prevented the lifting of sanctions. The Iraqi leadership struggled to resolve this dilemma, as elites pursued competing policies and subordinates did not consistently obey Saddam Hussein's orders. These difficulties reflected principal-agent problems that were aggravated by the leadership's initial attempts to deny and cover up Iraq's WMD capabilities. Together, the cheater's dilemma and principal-agent problems explain a range of puzzling Iraqi behaviors that came across as calculated ambiguity to the outside world. These findings offer insights into the incentives and constraints that shape how other authoritarian regimes respond to external pressures to eliminate their WMD, and the extent to which they are willing and able to disclose information about past programs and their past efforts to conceal this information from the outside world.

Career Ladder: Kabrena Rodda

1986 Discovering the military In high school, Kabrena Rodda attended a science and engineering program where she met recent military academy graduates. The experience was “transformational,” she says. It led her to enter the U.S. Air Force Academy, where Rodda discovered that she “loved the hands-on experiential learning” of chemistry labs. Chemistry became her major. 1994 Forensic scientist One of Rodda’s first military assignments was as a chemical weapons inspector, doing on-site inspections and running an analytical lab to support a United Nations mission to ensure that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were destroyed after the Gulf War. “I realized I was fascinated by forensic science and analytical chemistry,” she says. She went on to pursue her master’s degree at the University of Washington, where she worked on a project that applied analytical chemistry to postmortem forensic toxicology. 1996 Teaching and a Ph.D. After finishing her master’s, Rodda returned to

Intelligence Failure as a Mutually Reinforcing Politico-Intelligence Dynamic: The Chilcot Report and the Nature of the Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure

By the time the Chilcot Report was published in July 2016, inquiries of one sort or another focusing on Iraq had been a semi-permanent feature of British politics for a quarter of a century. These stretched back to the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the House of Commons Trade and Industry Select Committee’s investigation of Britain’s role in producing a ‘supergun’ for Saddam Hussein’s regime, and included Sir Richard Scott’s 1992–96 investigation into the export of defence and dual-use goods to Iraq.1 The question of intelligence failure in relation to the 2003 invasion of Iraq had itself been either the context for or subject of four previous inquiries by the time the Chilcot inquiry was established. The Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) quickly published a report into The Decision to Go to War in Iraq in July 2003,2 but without access to intelligence assessments. The parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) produced its report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Intelligence and Assessments in September 2003.3 This was followed by the report of a judicial inquiry conducted by a former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Lord Hutton, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence biological weapons expert who committed suicide after giving evidence to the FAC inquiry.4 After this report in January 2004, the Blair Government felt obliged to concede a further inquiry into the WMD question, to be conducted by a team of privy counsellors led by former Cabinet Secretary Lord Butler and including former Northern Ireland Permanent Secretary Sir John Chilcot among its members.

Forty-five Minutes that Changed the World: The September Dossier, British Drama, and the New Journalism

On September 24, 2002, Tony Blair's government released a dossier with exaggerate claims regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities. The September Dossier would become a cornerstone of Blair's case for war in Iraq, while the arguments against the claims—and their use in government and media—also became regular features in British drama. Through an examination of Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, David Hare's Stuff Happens, and Colin Teevan's How Many Miles to Basra?, this article explores the critique of media and government in contemporary British theater that engages pre-Iraq war intelligence. This analysis of three genres of Iraq War drama—a verbatim play, a docudrama, and a fictional play—examines the challenges to the intersection of art and journalism. Specifically, it appears that British theater, while providing a more critical venue for analyzing the narration of the Iraq War, became a parallel monolith for a singular narrative of the war that did not create a sufficient replacement for a reliable and rigorous press.

Report X Marks the Spot: The British Government's Deceptive Dossier on Iraq and WMD

The British government published a dossier on 24 September 2002 setting out its claims regarding Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). 1 Parliament was recalled for an emergency session on the same day to hear Prime Minister Tony Blair’s presentation of it. The dossier stated that Iraq had WMD and was producing more. After the invasion in March 2003, no WMD were found. Ever since, there has been controversy as to whether the dossier reported accurately intelligence which turned out to be wrong, as Blair has claimed consistently, or whether the dossier deliberately deceived by intentionally giving the impression of greater Iraqi WMD capability and threat than the intelligence suggested. Despite a great deal of attention to the September dossier, there has not been any analysis conceptually well developed enough, or sufficiently grounded in the empirical evidence, to make much headway in resolving this disagreement. This article assesses the extent to which the dossier was part of a campaign of organized political persuasion and whether that campaign involved demonstrable deception. It shows that the dossier did not accurately represent the content and strength of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. Instead, the dossier portrayed a misleading picture of greater capability and greater certainty than the intelligence warranted. The misleading nature of the dossier was not an accident. There was a concerted effort by many of those involved in producing the dossier to push the claims about the intelligence as far as possible. The phrase “dodgy dossier” was originally used to describe this September dossier. 2 The British government published another dossier on 3 February 2003 which was exposed as being mostly plagiarized. 3 Subsequently, the term “dodgy dossier” has tended to be applied mainly to this second dossier. In view of the arguments in this article, the September dossier ought to be known as the deceptive dossier. The argument in this article is structured in four sections. The first section surveys official claims regarding the dossier, the results of four successive inquiries (the fifth has not yet reported), and the scholarly literature to date. Here the article shows that, despite some discussion of the dossier in numerous publications, there has still not been an in‐depth analysis of its contents and production which is conceptually well developed and which draws on vital information that has become available in the last few years. The second section sets out the conceptual framework, while the third applies it to the empirical record. The article shows that the dossier was fundamentally misleading about the intelligence and that deliberate deception through omission and distortion was involved. The conclusion considers the significance of the deceptive dossier.

Deception and Britain’s road to war in Iraq

Abstract Ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there has been a widely shared public perception in the United Kingdom and beyond that the British government lied in making the case for war. One major theme has been the view that the Blair government lied about the strength of the intelligence about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the extent of the WMD capabilities claimed by that intelligence. A second theme that has received less attention has been the view that the Blair government lied in claiming that its actions at the United Nations (UN) were aimed at securing peaceful Iraqi compliance with its disarmament obligations. Instead, most think that the United Kingdom was actually committed to a policy of regime change by force and did not want the ‘UN route’ to produce a peaceful outcome. The article argues that the conceptual focus of the discussion needs to be broadened from lying to also considering deception by omission and deception by distortion as part of a campaign of organized political persuasion. It argues that, on the WMD intelligence, it is now apparent that a campaign of deceptive organized political persuasion was conducted by UK officials. With respect to the UN route, there is mounting evidence that the Blair government ran a campaign of deception on this issue as well in order to pave Britain’s road to war in Iraq.

The Failure of American Intelligence in its Pre-War Assessment of Iraq's WMD program

The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by U.S.-led coalition forces is widely recognized to have occurred in large part due to the incorrect assessment of Iraq's WMD program by American intelligence. The pervasive political atmosphere influenced the Intelligence Community (IC) into forming conclusions of an active and threatening Iraqi WMD program off of assumptions and inferences that were grounded in preconceptions of Saddam rather than solid evidence. There were multiple failures throughout the intelligence cycle. Not only was information gathered inaccurate and dependent on unreliable sources, but the analytical process was seriously compromised by a desire to make the evidence fit the prevalent belief. Consequently, alternative possibilities to explain Saddam's behaviour were never considered for it was assumed that his intentions had remain unchanged. The most egregious failure was still in the dissemination of intelligence, whereby efforts were not made to convey the degree of certainty of conclusions or to rectify distortion by policymakers. None of this occurred in a vacuum, however, and failed intelligence cannot be singled out as the cause for the invasion. Analysts were operating in a fog of preconceived historical bias against Saddam, his deceptive and uncooperative behaviour during weapons monitoring, as well as the overwhelming desire of policymakers to have him deposed; this made their conclusion seem all but justified. The additional politicization of intelligence and its manipulation to sell the war to the public also points to the minimal role intelligence may have, in fact, had in policymakers' decisions, for the war was purported to happen whether intelligence could justify it or not.

Missing the logic of the text

This article focuses on the final report of Lord Butler’s review of British intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), specifically on its treatment of the accuracy of the use of intelligence on Iraqi WMD in a government dossier published in September 2002 ahead of the 2003 Iraq war. In the report, the demonstration of the accuracy of the “September Dossier” hinges on the insertion of tables that compare side-by-side quotations from this document and from intelligence assessments. The analysis of the textual and visual methods by which the report is written reveals how the logic of the comparative tables is missed in the Butler report: the logic of these tables requires that the comparison between quotations from the two documents should be performed at the level of their details but the Butler report performs its comparison only at a broad and general level.

WMD Monitoring and Verification Regimes: Lessons from Iraq

In the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there emerged a generally accepted view that the US government misinterpreted, or even deliberately misconstrued, the intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that, in sharp contrast, international monitoring and verification regimes correctly verified prior to the war that Iraq had no WMD and deterred Saddam Hussein from pursuing them. Critiques of international inspections tend to overstate their capabilities and the levels of confidence that inspection processes can give the international community in verifying weapons development and rollback claims. The Iraqi case is important for thinking about current and future monitoring and verification regimes, but important lessons are being overlooked – and the wrong lessons are being learned. A sober reassessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the monitoring and verification in Iraq provides important lessons for those dealing with difficult cases now and in the future.

Creating Intelligence Communities

This article analyses the factors bearing upon achieving organizational change in the world of secret intelligence in the US and the UK, identifying for success the need for a convincing narrative, adequate budgetary control and understanding of the special psycho-dynamics to be expected in secret organizations. The article examines in that light the different paths of development of the concept of a single national intelligence community in the US and in the UK, and identifies common reasons for renewed pressure in the light of the experiences of international terrorism and the pre-war failures of intelligence over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Both US and UK intelligence communities, for different reasons, are seen to be some way short of where they need to be to face the challenges of future intelligence work against global threats that span the domestic and overseas spaces.

John Howard, weapons of mass destruction and the public’s right to know

In March 2003, Australia went to war in Iraq to find and remove Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). None were found. An Australian Parliamentary Committee concluded: The case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD on large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq's WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations. This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of the assessments provided to the Commmittee by the Australian Office of National Assessments (ONA) and the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO).

The Incisive Fight: Recommendations for Improving Counterterrorism Intelligence

The intelligence community has evolved significantly since the failures of 9/11 and the inaccurate assessments on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Congressional action has resulted in multiple far-reaching reforms and tectonic organizational shifts. On the strategic level, however, counterterrorism intelligence policy has been muddled during the past eight years. The Bush administration, for example, called on the intelligence community to “bolster the growth of democracy.” The next president should cast aside political ideology and build on reform efforts to empower top-notch leaders. Strong new leaders in the intelligence community must energize the National Counterterrorism Center and provide the president with comprehensive and policy-relevant intelligence analysis. The United States cannot eliminate the global terrorist threat alone—the next president must boost cooperation with liaison security services. Finally, the intelligence community must bolster its operational capacity to find and detain terrorists around the world.

What the Intelligence Community Got Right About Iraq

Although widely criticized for inaccurate estimates of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2002, the United States Intelligence Community was far more prescient about the likely consequences of a military campaign to remove Saddam Hussein. Intelligence assessments of the challenges likely to be faced by a post-war Iraq were widely disseminated within the Executive Branch and Congress and may have served to justify the Bush Administration's decision to undertake extensive reconstruction efforts rather than to turn power over at once to Iraqi leaders.

The Iraq Survey Group: From Weapons of Mass Destruction to Counterinsurgency

The discovery and elimination of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a focal point of the Coalition's strategy and operations in the aftermath of Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’. Despite the failure of the WMD mission to meet expectations after almost two years of intensive operations, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was able to integrate multinational and multi-agency forces to provide detailed intelligence regarding the history of Iraq's WMD programs and to assist in the battle against insurgents. The ISG's experience raises the question of whether a standing intelligence force could become a key component in future counterproliferation and counterterrorism efforts around the world.1 1The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Dept. of Defense, or the US Government.

The United States and War Propaganda: from the Spanish-American War in Cuba (1898) to the Invasion of Iraq (2003)

In 1897 Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one”. He was thinking in his deep consciousness that “the Empire” needed war. In 1898 “the splendid little war” against Spain in Cuba was the answer to this expectation. Many decades later, following the dislocation of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, the USA emerged as the only superpower. It was in this context that the September 11 attacks took place. In 2003, Washington declared war on Iraq despite the international opposition. The USA waged a tremendous PR campaign to convince public opinion of the potential threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and of the involvement of the Saddam Hussein regime in the attacks against the World Trade Center. None of these reasons proved to be true, but the war showed the strength of different political and industrial lobbies.

The Return of Net Assessment

It has been almost two decades since the notion of ‘net assessment’ preoccupied strategic thought during the Cold War. It has not been revisited in a sustained manner since a flurry of articles and...

Guardians of power: the myth of the liberal media

Can a corporate media system be expected to tell the truth about a world dominated by corporations? Can newspapers, including the 'liberal' Guardian and the Independent, tell the truth about catastrophic climate change - about its roots in mass consumerism and corporate obstructionism - when they are themselves profit-oriented businesses dependent on advertisers for 75 per cent of their revenues? Can the BBC tell the truth about UK government crimes in Iraq when its senior managers are appointed by the government? Has anything changed since BBC founder Lord Reith wrote of the establishment: They know they can trust us not to be really impartial? Why did the British and American mass media fail to challenge even the most obvious government lies on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the invasion in March 2003? Why did the media ignore the claims of UN weapons inspectors that Iraq had been 90-95 per cent fundamentally disarmed as early as 1998? This book answers these questions, and more.

Preaching to the Choir

Williams continuedfrom previous page CD possess interesting—while not direct—parallels with the stories. Further, the music, like the stories, makes it all the more confounding why I can't say "Richard Bürgin" at the local Barnes and Noble and watch all the employees and customers light up. In sum, The Identity Club—book and CD—is the work of an incredibly talented artist. Let's just hope that those with enough money to buy the book will find themselves so enamored ofthe work within that they'll want to enter Richard Burgin's world over and over again. Tom Williams edits Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. Preaching to the Choir Fred Shochet Dear President Bush Cindy Sheehan Introduction by Howard Zinn City Lights http://www.citylights.com 164 pages; paper, $9.95 Cindy Sheehan's life ended and began anew on April 4, 2004, when her son, Casey, died five days into his Iraqi-War deployment. It ended because his death created an emotional and irreplaceable chasm in Sheehan's soul. It began because it drove Sheehan to new activism: to fight America's involvement in the Iraqi War. Since her rebirth, Sheehan has traveled nationally and internationally to gain support. She has met with congressional representatives and senators, she has led demonstrations and sit-ins, and she has established Gold Star Families for Peace, an organization offamily members who have lost loved ones in Iraq. Now, through Dear President Bush, Sheehan expands her efforts to print. She hopes to convert neutrals and opponents to her point ofview: to make them anti Iraqi-War activists. "Someone has to make George [Bush] face his failures and change his ways," she says. Sheehan's book is a collection of arguments presented in an assortment of chapter settings. The first and longest chapter is editor Greg Ruggiero's interview of Sheehan, where she barges in with pointed daggers. Bush and his administration are "[w]arprofiteers [and] are our true enemies." Bush's "preemptive strikes" are misguided and pad the pockets ofthe president and his administration pals. Bush promised to find weapons ofmass destruction in Iraq, but "there are none, and were none. The Downing Street memos have proven that he knew months before the invasion that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction." The Downing Street memos purport to be minutes of a July 2002 high-level meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other high-ranking British officials. Sheehan's endnotes direct readers to a web site offering the memos and annotated analyses. More, Sheehan adds, "we need to be more fair with policies that way too heavily favor Israel," and she asks and then answers her own questions: '"What noble cause did Casey die for? Was it freedom and democracy?' Bullshit. He died for oil. He died to make Bush's friends richer." Finally, near the end of the interview, Sheehan argues for diplomacy and other "peaceful means" to solve grievances and spare the lives of American soldiers and innocent Iraqi citizens. Sheehan's arguments are well intended, but she hampers her purpose with unsubstantiated assertions and contradictory conclusions. Her allegations that Bush and his "cronies" profit financially from the Iraqi War lack both evidence and logic. Are we to believe that America's congressional representatives and senators are so gullible as to continue funding a war fought to fill the pockets of Bush and his pals? It is a doubtful proposition that challenges Sheehan's credibility. And, does US policy really tilt unfairly to Israel? Sheehan says we are in this war because of oil, but why, then, would we adopt a policy that favors Israel and agitates Arab oil producing countries? The logic contradicts itself, and Sheehan presents no evidence to support her allegations. Moreover, Sheehan reminds us that Bush said Iraq was pursuing a program to develop weapons ofmass destruction, an agenda that was the underpinning of Bush's decision to invade. The United Nations includes chemical and biological weapons along with nuclear weapons in its definition ofweapons ofmass destruction, and there is no doubt that Iraq possessed and used chemical weapons against its Kurdish citizens and in its war against...

The Perfect Intelligence Failure? U.S. Pre‐War Intelligence on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction

Prewar U.S. intelligence suggested that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. None were found in Iraq. The threat they posed proved to be illusory and not imminent. Was Iraq a case of intelligence failure? In his seminal 1978 study of the inevitability of intelligence failure, Richard Betts argued that the most crucial mistakes are most often made by decision‐making consumers. Through analyses of the findings of the reports of the 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and President Bush’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, this article finds failures occurring at numerous points across the intelligence cycle including, despite the conclusions of these two inquiries, the policy‐maker level. Although issues surrounding these shortcomings remain keenly contested and a full explanation will only be possible once the role of policy makers has been scrutinized, the analysis provides a rare window through which analysts may better understand the dynamics of intelligence failure.

Reports, politics, and intelligence failures: The case of Iraq

The intelligence failure concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been the center of political controversy and official investigations in three countries. This article reviews the Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 7 July 2004, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, a Report of a Committee of Privy Councillors to the House of Commons, 14 July 2004 (the Butler Report), Report to the President of the United States, The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 31 March 2005. It explores the reasons for their deficiencies and the failure itself. This case and the investigations of it are similar to many previous ones. The investigations are marred by political bias and excessive hindsight. Neither the investigations nor contemporary intelligence on Iraqi WMD followed good social science practices. The comparative method was not utilized, confirmation bias was rampant, alternative hypotheses were not tested, and negative evidence was ignored. Although the opportunities to do better are many, the prospects for adequate reform are dim.