Why America got it wrong

America’s spies got it wrong. This is the finding of a United States presidential commission appointed to examine the intelligence reports which claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That such reports were completely wrong would be a huge revelation — except that everybody already knew it. Long before the actual invasion of Iraq, doubts were raised as to the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein. And those doubts were not raised only by anti-American ideologues, but by persons in the know, including the United Nations team which had been keeping Iraq under a close eye since Saddam’s attempted invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

But President George W Bush did not listen to these voices, nor even those within the American intelligence networks which dismissed such claims. Instead, Bush and his cronies grabbed at the slightest fragments of evidence which suggested that Saddam had, or was trying to develop, nuclear weapons. The presidential commission found that America’s spy agencies are “often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care most about.” Although the report did not say why this is so, we can make some logical guesses. For most of the twentieth century, the US concentrated all its intelligence efforts on the Soviet Union and other Communist nations, including Cuba. Its field agents, political analysts, linguists, and technology would have been trained and directed to battle the “Communist threat.”

But, with the symbolic collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the main threat to America’s interest shifted to the Middle East. Saddam’s attack on Kuwait was a visible sign of this shift, and indeed it is likely that he made his move in 1990 precisely because he hoped that America, still trying to adjust to the shift in East European politics, would not intervene. On the contrary, however, the collapse of Communism allowed the US to devote enough troops to the Gulf War so that Saddam’s forces were easily beaten back. But, it now turns out, America’s spy networks had become virtually useless.

Despite more than a half-century of Middle East instability, and the importance of that region’s oil reserves to America, the US agencies didn’t have good contacts within the Arabian countries, didn’t have the right kind of political consultants, and almost certainly didn’t have enough appropriately trained agents of the needed ethnicity to infiltrate those societies. In presenting the commission’s report, President Bush said, “The central conclusion is one which I share. America’s intelligence community needs fundamental change.” Yet, even if the US had had effective intelligence-gathering in place in Iraq, the question remains: Would this have made any difference to the Bush administration?

There is suggestive evidence that, even before the 9/11 attack, the Bush team had been discussing an invasion of Iraq. The immediate motive for such an invasion is not too hard to find. They wanted to secure America’s oil interests (and if, along the way, the Republican’s powerful friends benefited from contracts, all the better). Moreover, America’s strategists are well aware that, if current trends in India and China hold, the US, by 2050, will no longer be the world’s largest economy. The Iraq invasion may well have been the first step to consolidate America’s global hegemony. But this is mostly speculation. What is now not in doubt is that the Bush administration’s ostensible reason for invading Iraq is, and was, false. All we can hope is that, in pursuing his right-wing agendas, President Bush does not do the world irreparable damage before his term comes to an end.