Unproven: The Controversy over Justifying War in Iraq
David Cortright, Alistair Millar, George A. Lopez, and Linda Gerber
Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
June 2003
Executive Summary
The failure of U.S. and British forces in Iraq to find evidence of weapons of mass
destruction has sparked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic and in the wider
international community. Two contending explanations have been offered for why
the Bush administration made apparently questionable claims about weapons of
mass destruction. The first alleges an intelligence failure. The best analysts in the
CIA simply had no foolproof way of discerning what Saddam had. They gave the
administration a wide-ranging set of estimates, from benign to worst-case, and,
given the way bureaucracies behave, the president's advisors adopted the worse
case scenario. The second claim, more odious in form and substance, is that the
administration inflated and manipulated uncertain data, possibly even requesting
that material sent to it be redone to fit preconceived notions. The Bush
administration has gone to great pains to reassert that it stands by its previous
pronouncements that prohibited weapons will be located in due time.
Testing the merits of these explanations and sorting through the various issues
involved are important matters. But there is another question that needs to be
asked. Why was so much publicly available information on Iraq's weapons
programs systematically ignored in the months preceding the war? Part of the
answer may lie in the determination of Washington and London to confirm the
image, drawn mostly from the late 1980s and early 1990s, of a regime armed to
the teeth. As a result intelligence analysts and especially members of the
administration consistently failed to consider three important factors in analyzing
the scope of Iraqi weapons holdings.
The first was an unwillingness or inability to calculate accurately the combined
effects of the first Gulf War and twelve years of punishing sanctions. Secondly,
the administration had no interest in calculating into its estimates of Iraq's
holdings the successful destruction of weapons and materials under the previous
UN inspections regime, UNSCOM, from 1991 to 1998. Finally, the administration
worked to undermine the findings and experience of the new UN inspections
program, UNMOVIC, that began monitoring efforts in December 2002. As a
result of either stubbornness or short-sightedness, or both, the administration
failed to see the full picture of how successful prior efforts had been in dismantling many aspects of Iraqi weapons program. In fact, the efficacy of UN
disarmament efforts was dismissed summarily.
In this report we present the publicly available data that U.S. and UK leaders
chose to ignore in the pre-war debate. It provides a clear picture of what could
have — and should have — been known and what should have been balanced
against other more secretly obtained data on Iraq. This exercise is not revisionist
history as administration officials have claimed but a careful attempt to present
publicly available information evaluating the administration's justifications for war.
The reason those now searching for weapons are finding only traces, remnants,
and precursors is that previous policies of sanctions and UN weapons inspection
and destruction actually worked.
As officials investigate the controversies surrounding missing evidence in Iraq, it
may be useful to analyze the assertions that were made about weapons of mass
destruction and terrorist connections in Iraq, and the information that was
available to refute those claims. This report is drawn largely from studies
published prior to the war by the Fourth Freedom Forum and the Joan B. Kroc
Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Full Text (PDF, 20 pages, 120 KB)
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