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C h a p T e r 4 the seCond War: the intelliGenCe proBleM of iraQ aS TIMe passed, the al Qaeda battle was coupled with questions about this other, unexpected battlefield that would soon emerge as one of the biggest challenges we faced: Iraq. Consumed as we were with the immediacy of al Qaeda threats and how we were faring in that campaign, the Iraq problem came to us out of our peripheral vision, off the horizon and then slowly looming into view directly in front of us. we should have recognized sooner the keen interest the policy community had in Iraq and adjusted our analytic resources accordingly. we did not, and we suffered for it. early on, and as the Iraq crisis progressed in washington and at the United nations into 2003, we had a fuzzy picture of the Sunni extremist situation in Iraq, and this picture did not clarify much over time as war drew closer. Saddam was a committed opponent of Sunni radicals—they might, after all, pose a potent threat to his secular regime and his iron grip on security in the country, especially as the rise in Islamic militancy swept through the Middle east. he could only have looked around to see Palestinian Islamists gaining prominence in refugee camps, or al Qaeda-linked extremists’ growing prevalence on the arabian Peninsula. a similar strain of extremists in Iraq could mobilize people to threaten a regime that valued, first and foremost, its capability to stamp out any threats. why would a despotic thug want to allow such a potential threat in his midst? THE SECOND WAR 91 at the same time, Saddam must have known that this Sunni extremist threat was one of the biggest challenges the United States had faced in years. The 9/11 attacks had galvanized the attention of america, exposing weakness at home and drawing american armed forces ten thousand miles from home into afghanistan, a country that had already proved, through the failure of the Soviet experiment, fully capable of sapping the resources of a superpower. Saddam, meanwhile, had shown a willingness to work with Islamist radicals when it suited his purposes, paying stipends to families of suicide bombers in Palestine when he wanted to portray himself as a champion at the forefront of popular arab causes. why wouldn’t he find a marriage of convenience to use the most potent tool around, al Qaeda, to threaten us? The answer to this question was never straightforward, and the intelligence was mixed, at best: did Sunni radicals make Saddam so uncomfortable that he would never work with them, or did the old phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” apply, particularly in light of his regime’s openly acknowledged willingness to pay Palestinian suicide bombers’ families? Because of the combination of limited intelligence and the intense policy, Congressional, public, and international scrutiny of the intelligence we had, the Iraq-al Qaeda problem tested some of the fundamentals of intelligence work. The first principle is clear articulation of the difference between what analysts know; what they don’t know; and what they think. The second is the distinction, often muddled, between an adversary’s intentions and capabilities. Saddam clearly had the capability to maintain some sort of contact with al Qaeda elements, but his intentions were less clear. he was a man consumed with internal security; we had to try to judge whether this paramount concern, which would clearly lead him to distance Iraq from groups that might foment Islamist opposition to his dictatorship, trumped his interest in working with groups that were fighting his mortal enemy, america. The policy consumers of intelligence we dealt with every day wanted to know a lot about Saddam’s capabilities and intentions in great detail; we knew very little, and our knowledge did not grow substantially over time. These policy consumers wanted clarity; we could not provide it. and they wanted an understanding of what we thought about al Qaeda’s actions and intentions; we had limited knowledge of the former and even less of the latter. what we did have was sometimes contradictory. 92 CHAPTER 4 Bits of what we did know were captured and summarized in Secretary Powell’s speech to the United nations in February 2003. we knew al Qaedalinked individuals were in Iraq. we knew Saddam had aided other radicals; ideological purity was not his strong suit, and he might be willing to pull a lever that was seemingly at...

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