LACK OF INTELLIGENCE

Former British FM calls for parliamentary probe over Iraqi weapons (AFP, May 29, 2003)

Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook called Wednesday for an inquiry after the United States said Iraqi forces may have destroyed the country's alleged weapons of mass destruction before war broke out.

"If (US Defence Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven't been there for quite a long time," Cook, who resigned from the government over the war, told the BBC.

"I think that has to be investigated. A (parliamentary) select committee is one way of doing it," Cook later told Channel 4 News.

We've always assumed (and still do) that plenty of WMD would be found, but hoped it wouldn't be--thus making the removal of the regime the sole point of the war. However, if no WMD is ever found it counterintuitively serves the hawks rather than the doves in two specific ways. First, it makes the point that, even though Iraq was the number one target of our post-Cold War intelligence gathering, we had absolutely no idea what was going on there. The idea that we do not need to get rid of hostile regimes via military means because we can know what they're up to is simply false. Second, it will reveal once again that our intelligence mistakes are always of the same type: they overestimate the capacity of the enemy. Thus the Soviet Union was always much weaker than our intelligence claimed it was and could likely have been defeated rather easily at every point during the Cold War and we conceded victory to a North Vietnam that we had effectively defeated. Both of these lessons tend to teach that force should be a more ready recourse when confronting hostile regimes. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 29, 2003 10:11 AM