Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [234]
Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that [UN] inspectors departed—December 1998.
If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year.
Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents; these facilities can evade detection and are highly survivable. Within three to six months these units probably could produce an amount of agent equal to the total that Iraq produced in the years prior to the Gulf war.
Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al-Qa’ida—with worldwide reach and extensive terrorist infrastructure, and already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States—could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct.
In such circumstances, he might decide that the extreme step of assisting the Islamist terrorists in conducting a CBW [chemical or biological weapon] attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him.8
American intelligence officials were joined in many of these startling assessments by intelligence services from other nations—Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, and Poland among them—all of whom judged that Saddam’s regime possessed WMD and was expanding its capabilities. Even Russia, China, Germany, and France, then skeptical of any military action against Iraq, agreed. “There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq,” said French President Jacques Chirac. He added, “The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.”9 On the subject of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, the German chief of intelligence actually held a grimmer view than the U.S. intelligence community: “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years.”10 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cautioned General Franks that Saddam had biological weapons and would use them on American forces.11 A multitude of specific, seemingly credible reports, some even illustrated with satellite photographs, provided supporting evidence.
Early in the war, while major combat operations were still underway, I was asked on a news program if I was concerned about the failure to find WMD in Iraq. I had always tried to speak with reserve and precision on intelligence matters, but on this occasion, I made a misstatement. Recalling the CIA’s designation of various “suspect” WMD sites in Iraq, I replied, “We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.”12 I should have used the phrase “suspect sites.” My words have been quoted many times by critics of the war as an example of how the Bush administration misled the public.
One of the challenges for historians is distinguishing the essential from the inessential, the predominant from the marginal, the characteristic from the exceptional. Promoters of the frequently repeated “Bush lied, people died” line have scoured a voluminous record of official statements on Iraqi WMD to compile a small string of comments—ill chosen or otherwise deficient—to try to depict the administration as purposefully misrepresenting the intelligence. While I made a few misstatements—in particular the one mentioned above—they were not common and certainly not characteristic. Other senior administration officials also did a reasonably good job of representing the intelligence community’s assessments accurately in their public comments about Iraqi WMD, despite some occasionally imperfect formulations.
Intelligence evidence about WMD had a way of taking pride of place in the litany of reasons for going to war. In fact, that should have been only one of the many reasons.