Combating Proliferation: Strategic Intelligence and Security Policy

Preface

Preface It was an extraordinary moment in American diplomacy when Secretary of State Colin Powell briefed the UN Security Council in a last-ditch diplomatic effort to avoid war. In a once-in-a-lifetime presentation on February5, 2003— one reminiscent of that given by his predecessor, Adlai Stevenson, in the context of the Cuban MissileCrisis—Powell charged that the Iraqi government was in "material breach" of a decade's worth of Security Council resolutions, presented substantial intelligence data to make the case, and charged that Iraq's recalcitrance had moved it "closer to the day when it will face serious consequences for its continued defianceof this Council/'1 President George W. Bush had addressed the United Nations in September 2002, warning that Saddam Hussein's regime posed a "grave and gathering danger" and throwing down the gauntlet to the assembled body: "The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. AreSecurity Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence ? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"2 Set against the backdrop of the post-September 11, 2001, security landscape, this was a defining moment for American foreign policy. The administration's just-released national-security strategywas quite pointed in its appraisal of the twin challenges posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terrorism to USnational security: "The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to proceed. . . . History will judge harshly those who saw the coming danger but failed to act. In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and xii Preface security is the path of action/'3 In this context the intelligence community assessed , among other things, that: • "Iraq has continued its WMDprograms in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions/' • "Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program/' • "We have low confidence in our ability to assess when Saddam would use WMD." • "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical or biological weapons] against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making 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 Islamic terrorists in conducting a CBWattack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."4 The "high confidence" intelligence judgments that Iraqi WMD programs were continuing and, in some areas, expanding were paired with "low confidence " judgments relating to when the Iraqi leadership would use WMD, whether they would engage in clandestine attacks against the US homeland, and whether they would ultimately share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qaeda, the organization responsible for widespread, high-impact acts of terror against the United States at home and abroad. In the context of such uncertainty the policy calculus adopted by senior White House officials was straightforward: the risks of inaction would outweigh the risks of action. Subsequent to what would eventually be known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, Vice President Dick Cheney argued that failing to confront the government ofSaddam Hussein would have been "irresponsible in the extreme" since the "safety of the American people was at stake."5 In the five-month period following President Bush'schallenge to the United Preface xiii Nations and SecretaryPowell's final diplomatic full-court press, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), a body that had been created in...