Haaretz
Kislev 18, 5766
"It is true that much of the intelligence turned
out to be wrong," U.S. President George W. Bush said last week, prior to
Thursday's parliamentary elections in Iraq, thus aligning himself with
what America has considered an indisputable fact for some time now: There
were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush believes that the
offensive was justified despite this mistake. The debate on this question
is only beginning, but he already closed the argument about the
intelligence failure: "As president, I am responsible for the decision to
go into Iraq. And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by
reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just
that."
And here is what he said about other intelligence services,
including those of Israel: "When we made the decision to go into Iraq,
many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed
weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, many top intelligence and army
officials in Israel still insist: "We said this at the time and we were
not mistaken. The Americans are the ones who are making the mistake now."
Here is an interesting version that does not worry the public in
Israel, in the absence of a public debate over the war in Iraq. These
senior officials, who are intimately familiar with Israeli intelligence
material, still believe that Iraq really did have weapons of mass
destruction. Not nuclear weapons, of course. Israel never made this claim.
The Americans indeed erred in inflating the insubstantial information on
nuclear plans. But there were chemical and biological weapons. And if the
Americans have decided otherwise, especially for political reasons, they
are now making a second error on top of the first error.
Some of
these officials have shared their views with their American contacts. "Why
didn't we find the weaponry?" the Americans asked. The Israelis told them
politely: because most of it was transferred to Syria before the war. Such
suspicions have been openly published. All the intelligence services in
the West are familiar with photographs of trucks sneaking across the
border at night, accompanied by senior Iraqi officers. The problem is that
the moment Israel turns an accusatory finger toward Syria, it is
immediately suspected of ulterior, political motives. "They can think
whatever they want," an Israeli officer says. "Perhaps it is impossible to
change their opinion, but it is also impossible to change the truth.
Material was transferred to Syria in the dark of the night, on the very
eve of the war. Therefore, the Americans did not find it." And this, as
suggested above, is the more polite explanation.
The other
explanation is expressed in more intimate circles in order to avoid
irritating the American friend. But in the course of two weeks, I heard it
from three different Israelis who were in positions that had access to
intelligence during the war. Some of them are still serving in such
positions. "They simply don't know how to search properly," said one. "Do
you know how they searched? The forces were sent to a certain location and
went into the field without a serious intelligence escort. If there was
nothing found under the rock at this location, they simply went home,
without bothering to turn over the adjacent rock," another
said.
Some of these materials are still hidden in Iraq, the Israeli
sources believe. Perhaps they will be found in the future. Maybe not. It
is also not completely clear who knows where they are and who is
controlling them. The Americans did not find the material transferred to
Syria because they did not search there, of course. For many in the
American defense establishment who opposed the war, it is very convenient
that the material was not found. Thus they can take revenge against their
rivals in the administration who disparaged them and ignored their
recommendations during the months leading up to the war.
This all
means one of two things: In Israel, in the absence of a comprehensive
public discussion, the defense establishment is burying its head in the
sand and refusing to admit a colossal mistake - a fundamentally wrong
assessment of Iraq's non-conventional capabilities. Or, in the United
States, due to troubling political circumstances, the public has
formulated an opinion about the quality of intelligence material and has
forced the administration to confess to an error that was much smaller
than what the Americans had believed. "It is already impossible to change
the public's opinion in America, unless a giant amount of chemical weapons
were to be found suddenly. And the problem is that no one can search for
it now," says an Israeli source. President Bush's hands are tied. In the
current political circumstances, it is inconceivable for him to order that
searches be resumed. In any case, a true, renewed discussion on the
quality of intelligence information on the eve of the war will only be
possible sometime later in the future, if at all.