General Tommy Franks told radio host Sean Hannity earlier this week that Jordan's King Abdullah and Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak told the U.S. prior to the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. "A number of other leaders in the Mideast told us he had them, too," NewsMax.com reports Franks telling Hannity, with the general adding, "If you were president of the United States, could you avoid paying attention to that?"

No, but since when did we rely on the intelligence of Egypt and Jordan, or the Czech Republic, Great Britain, and Ahmed Chalabi for that matter? Intelligence sharing among allies has always occurred, but what about the primacy of U.S. intelligence? The unfortunate reality is that American intelligence didn't have a single human source on the ground in Iraq. You can't credibly gather intelligence by satellite and desk analysts alone. When you do, you're compelled to rely on other countries for human intelligence. In other words, you rely on the unreliable. Our weak intelligence led to the debacle in Iraq, the confusing of an aspirin factory for a weapons plant in Sudan, and the belief in the hoax of a genocide of Kosovar Muslims by the Serbs.

Certainly it was not absurd to believe that Iraq might have had WMD in early 2003, that Sudan might have been manufacturing dangerous weapons in the summer of 1998, or that Milosevic was capable of genocide in 1999. But to act on these suspicions, you need confirmation--something we lacked.

If you haven't noticed, there's a pattern to the major claims made prior to the U.S. invasion to justify the Iraq war. Bush Administration officials cited Czech intelligence in promoting the phantom Muhammad Atta meeting with Iraqi agents in Prague. The President relied on British intelligence for his claim that Hussein attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. And now they're trying to share blame on the weapons of mass destruction intelligence gaffes with Middle Eastern governments.

So where are the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction? Perhaps they're buried in the mass graves of thousands in Serbia, or hidden in the chemical weapons plant disguised as an aspirin factory in Sudan. This is just a guess based on analysis, but then again isn't that what passes for intelligence within our government these days?

Great post.

I think the post was well written. I do not wholly support President Bush in his will to go to war, but some of the things you will never hear the mass media news tell you or show you is that in a dessert such as this there are numerous ways to hide weapons. In recent months MIG-25's have been found buried in the sand in Iraq, proof that at the very least they had the portability for WMDs. In fact in that vast strectch of desert who knows what is really buried in the sand that we have missed. It would help us greatly to have our own operatives on the ground in more foreign countries than we have, the only problem is that the same countries who would want us to come to their aid with any intelligence we would have gathered would rather kill our agents simply because we are American. That makes us have to rely on the intelligence of other countries. Though it would appear that this is not always a bad thing.

Dan, i don't disagree that it sure would have been nice to have Americans gathering the intelligence which we relied upon to go to war but I find a few of your points disingenuous.

For one, you still ignore the fact tha WMD was not the only impetus for the war. Was it the most widely spread one? Certainly. But it was certainly not the only thing cited. Second, we did pull two tons of just-shy-of-weapons-grade uranium out of Iraq a couple months ago. Since the Israelis took out the only nuclear power plant in the country back in the lat eighties, there was no plausible legitimate reason for taht to be there aside from a WMD activity. Third, the Niger uranium claim was accurate. Were there some forged docs planted in the evidence to throw off the Brits? Yes, but the rest of the evidence was solid, Saddam did indeed attempt to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

The bombing of the aspirin factory and the ill-advised intervention in the former Yugoslavia, which you pin on Bush by implication (the fact that you never mention who was president when those took place would lead one who didn't already know with the idea that Bush was responsible for those) were under Clinton. I find it really disingenuous and almost an act of desperation on your part to include those in your survey of Bush's lackadaisical approach to actionable intelligence.

And if we waited until we had rock-solid, incontrovertible, American-gathered intelligence, would we have relied on the Brits when they got the Enigma machine?

Yes, relying on other nations for intelligence is risky, but we'd be stupid not to.

And since the CIA and other intelligence gathering agencies (not to mention the military in general) were raped by the previous administration (that's the one that actually did blow up the aspirin factory, intervene in Kosovo, fire cruise missiles into Iraq and Afghanistan to no effect but to piss off people, did nothing to respond to the Khobar Towers bombing, the USS Cole bombing, etc.) Bush was practically compelled by the circumstances to rely more heavily on foreign intelligence sources...

or should we all have waited until our intelligence gathering was back up to Cold War levels or better before doing anything to secure ourselves from what any reasonable observation based on the best intelligence available, said was an imminent and growing threat?

I'm not an intelligence expert so maybe someone can tell me how you get a reliable human source of information in such situations. Let me make a prima facie case that it is impossible. Iraqi generals believed their country had WMD's (all of them thought they were under another's command.) So the human source would have to get into Saddam's inner circle to verify these reports. To do that would probably require committing atrocities and a source that would do that would, by my definition, be unreliable.
The agencies won't tell us this because it hurts their credibility and lets our enemies know about agency vulnerabilities. Still we shouldn't attack the agencies for not doing the impossible.
The left does enough complaining that government agencies don't meet their unrealistic expectations. We should be more sensitive to the inherent limits of government action.

I must say this was an excellent post.

"We should be more sensitive to the inherent limits of government action."

DocMcG: your argument for the inherent difficulties of good intel isn't a defense of Bush and his people, or their war, or their claims leading up to the war of rock-solid intelligence. Rather, it is a good reason indeed to oppose _all_ wars of choice.

But I should be thankful! One by one, neocons are getting religion and remembering the limitations of government action. I guess they just forgot for a few (crucial) years.

I'm sure they won't suffer from these memory laspes when the Dems are back in charge.

I don't understand Mols response, maybe because I have no satisfactory specification for the term "war of choice."

Was the American Revolution a "war of choice?" The Mexican War? Vietnam? WWI? WWII? There are always choices; to live as others want us to, to live in fear, to die, or to fight. Sometimes we choose to fight. In the Revolution we fought for a principle that few in the world can see or appreciate, but I affirm that to fight was the right choice.

'War of choice' is not be a precisely defined term, but it is useful in any case, unless people pretend not to understand it.

DocMcG: "There are always choices; to live as others want us to, to live in fear, to die, or to fight."

Now you sound like you're giving a speech to the Iraqis, not to the Americans. Iraq was certainly not forcing US to chose between death and living as others dictate. Your Alamo-like speech conjures up images of Iraqis closing in on us. On the contrary: We didn't have any cause for war against the Iraqis. The only people with cause for war in Iraq were the Iraqis against there own government.