After Colin Powell died this week, almost every obituary highlighted not only his military leadership and service to multiple presidents, but also his speech before the United Nations. Yes, the speech alleging that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and laying out the rationale for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq just weeks later.
When subsequent events showed the intelligence Powell cited to be wrong, he acknowledged the episode was a “blot” on his record. Contrary to hagiographers such as intelligence community veteran Paul Pillar, however, the Bush administration neither duped Powell nor forced the secretary of state to give his U.N. speech. Rather, vanity got the best of Powell.
Just as when U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice rushed to the Sunday talk shows with inaccurate information about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Powell’s first concern was the spotlight. He wanted to be front and center and feared that Vice President Dick Cheney or another Bush administration official would speak before the world if he did not. He felt shame only in hindsight; had the U.S. intelligence been correct, he and his proxies would not have leaked his unease about it to journalists and authors in an effort to salvage his reputation — a salvage effort at the expense of colleagues in the George W. Bush administration.
Powell was not alone in his bureaucratic derriere covering. But while he, the CIA, and the Pentagon sought to shift blame onto their rivals or perhaps Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, the basic problem that led to the faulty intelligence remains unresolved. It is, therefore, liable to repeat.
The problem was neither Chalabi nor associated exiles telling Bush what he wanted to hear. More damning intelligence actually came from other groups, such as the two major Kurdish parties, both of whom had remained in Iraq and remain U.S. partners today. While the exiles’ stories might have influenced public debate, by law, only the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA could debrief defectors. Polygraph tests, however, cannot tell what is true or not; they can only indicate whether the subject is knowingly deceptive. Many Iraqi defectors truly believed Iraq continued its robust WMD program after 1991 and so tested as not-deceptive during their debriefings.
Of course, U.S. intelligence relied on far more than defector accounts. Signals intelligence was also important. These included, most persuasively, transcripts from intercepted phone calls between the Iraqi dictator’s top lieutenants discussing the WMD program as fact.
Herein lies the problem: The human intelligence and defector accounts affirmed the signals intelligence and vice versa. All of these, however, had their roots in Hussein’s bluff. He convinced Bush, but only because Hussein had convinced his own generals first. Even intelligence agencies of states opposed to the war (for example, Germany’s) had come to the same conclusion that Iraq had an active WMD program. Their dispute was not over the veracity of the intelligence, but rather the policy prescription to address it.
The reality is that Hussein’s bluffs shaped the preponderance of the information at Bush and Powell’s disposal.
The U.S. intelligence community enjoys a budget of more than $60 billion, but almost two decades after Powell’s speech, it has not addressed the basic problem: what to do when different streams of intelligence affirm each other but all spring from a dictator’s bluff. The potential for the same self-reaffirming intelligence streams exists in the analysis of dictatorships such as China, North Korea, and Iran, where being wrong and being right can be just as destructive, albeit for different reasons.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
