Yale Law Professor On Iraq War WMD Intelligence: Nobody "Lied" Or "Spun" The Intelligence

Stephen Carter writes:

A bracing challenge to this view is provided by “The Art of Betrayal,” Gordon Corera’s enthralling history of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Corera, a widely respected British Broadcasting Corp. journalist with impeccable sources in the clandestine world, devotes a good deal of his narrative to the question of what went wrong in Iraq. But the wider focus is on the shadowy, yet colorful, figures who have populated the agency since the dawn of the Cold War. The book is worth reading for Corera’s detailed recounting of largely unexamined swaths of secret history, which I will discuss in a future column. For the present, let us consider only what he has to say about Iraq -- and, in particular, about the notion that U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and their staffs fabricated the evidence of weapons of mass destruction...  Corera has combed available public sources, both official investigations and various memoirs, and added to it his own reporting, most of it from anonymous intelligence sources. His ironic conclusion: “Everyone, including the spies, was convinced by the intelligence that said Saddam had the weapons,” he writes. Yet “they were not sure it looked strong enough to win the argument.”  By everyone, Corera means everyone. As he reminds us, even Hans Blix, the chief United Nations arms inspector before the war, believed that Saddam Hussein had hidden weapons of mass destruction. David Kay, who led the postwar Iraq Survey Group that found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, went into his search expecting to find the opposite. In this sense, Bush and Blair were just along for the ride... Overall, Corera agrees with the conclusion of the British investigators: With a single exception, the intelligence wasn’t spun by the politicians. It was “simply wrong.” From the point of view of the spies, he points out, this realization is far more damaging. It means they didn’t do their jobs. And the political leaders, says Corera, “believed the intelligence they had been told about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”... In the case of Iraq, one issue is that there was, in effect, a deadline: It was increasingly clear that Bush and Blair meant to go to war by early 2003. Thus the intelligence agencies were faced with the need to find a way to document what they believed to be true but couldn’t quite prove. As Corera points out, the enemy of good intelligence work is often time. It can take months or years to determine whether a bit of information is even true -- longer still to figure out what it means. The faster the spies have to work, the greater the likelihood of error.
 

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