A Thin Basis for War - William M. Arkin - LA Times

A Thin Basis for War

By William M. Arkin
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion. E-mail: warkin@igc.org.

July 27, 2003

SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — When the Bush administration, which puts a high premium on secrecy, starts declassifying top-secret documents, you've got to wonder what gives.

Clearly, advisors hoped that releasing excerpts of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction" would benefit President Bush. In the short term, their aim was to demonstrate that intelligence agencies believed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger to restart its nuclear weapons program, as Bush alleged in his State of the Union address Jan. 28. The document represents the consensus of the intelligence community at that time, before forgeries were known to be behind the allegation. And it includes a footnote on the State Department's doubts about the reported ore purchase, a footnote the administration hopes to use as evidence of its own internal debate.

On a grander scale, some presidential advisors must believe that declassifying portions of the report also shows that the administration had ample reason to launch a preemptive war against Iraq, with or without the uranium allegation. Does the intelligence estimate really show that?

A close reading of the released document suggests two things: First, the administration clearly believed that Iraq had large caches of biological and chemical weapons and an active program to produce more. But the report, along with sources familiar with it, also makes clear that the evidence to support this belief was shockingly thin. Neither the released portions nor the full report substantiate the administration's view that Iraq represented an immediate threat to the United States or the region.

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