During the 1950’s the Soviet Union was believed to be one of the world’s largest industrial powerhouses. The State Central Planning Agency, GOSPLAN, was ordering millions of tons of consumer and military goods a year. Factories had sprung up all across the USSR under Stalin’s brutal industralization policies. Throughout the Cold War, policymakers were warned that the Soviet Union had a vast arsenal of fighters, bombers, missiles, and tanks that could be used to steamroll across Western Europe at any time unless NATO could stop them.
Yet when the Iron Curtain fell, the truth was something different. The Soviet Union could most accurately be referred to as a kleptocracy, a system of governance based on theft. If GOSPLAN were to order one million pairs of boots for Leningrad, that order and the money would be sent to a regional director, who would skim off the top. The money, which was insufficient to begin with, would be sent then to the factory, were more money would be skimmed. The end result would either be one million pairs of baby-sized boots, or boots with incredibly shoddy construction, or no boot at all. Yet GOSPLAN still believed those boots had been produced and were in the stores. This same phenomenon also happened with Soviet military procurements as well. The Soviet system of industry was a joke, and the CIA’s analysis of the Soviet’s production capacity were greatly inflated.
Move ahead 25 years to the present day, where the CIA is taking fire for its predictions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Our evidence for the WMD argument was culled by wiretaps, satellite photography, and defectors who told of Hussein’s WMD programs in great depth.
But what if this had all been a deception – not by the US or the other intelligence agencies who came to similar conclusions, but a deception on Saddam Hussein himself? David Warren thinks this is a distinct possibility, and his is the argument that seems to do the best job at fitting the facts on all sides.
For — wait for it — Saddam himself did not know he lacked weapons of mass destruction. The analyses of documents, interrogations, and searches conducted by Mr. Kay’s teams paint the most extraordinary picture of a regime that had self-compressed into a general state of paranoid psychosis around the same key year of 1998, and functioned like an unstaffed mental asylum.
Saddam put himself personally in charge of all the weapons programmes, and trusting no one except the people running them for him, allowed them to pocket huge amounts of oil money for projects that never bore any fruit. Copious hypothetical plans were drawn up, and again and again the Kay teams found the paper equivalent of a “smoking gun”, only to be unable to pair it with real-life evidence. That was because Saddam’s weapons programmes — except for some progress in illicit missile-making — existed only on paper.
Is such a thing possible? As the Soviet Union showed, it most certainly is. A totalitarian state like Iraq wouldn’t be likely to have someone who would tell the boss that his WMD money was being spend on lavish parties and foreign bank accounts. So nobody spoke up. In fact, as Warren notes, it’s possible that key people also thought that Iraq had WMDs, and orders were given to use it. Atropine was bought to protect troops from weapons that weren’t there. Hussein ordered the Iraqi Army to use chemical shells that no one had – but even commanders on the field didn’t know that there were no weapons. Since there was almost no communication between units in the Iraqi Army or Republican Guard, no one knew what the others were doing.
But moreover, from the perspective of the CIA, you’d be fooled too. Your radio traffic would have talk of WMDs. Defectors would speak of programs they saw that were either Potemkin forgeries or only on paper. Every indication would be that Iraq had WMDs and they could be used at a moment’s notice – but because we were relying on the same intelligence as the Iraqi leadership, we were also being drawn into the forgery. We’d get close to a “smoking gun” only to find that it was a fake – exactly the kind of trickery used to fool Saddam Hussein.
Who would have known the truth? Certain generals (the ones who were stealing the money), and Uday and Qusay. With the two thuggish sons of Saddam now roasting hell, getting the truth from them is now impossible. Likely they were duping their old man into giving them plenty of resources dedicated to procuring liquor, cars, and cash rather than anthrax, smallpox, or sarin. If there was a deception, it was one that could only exist in a compartmentalized country run by fear like Iraq.
When the UN inspectors showed up, the Iraqis wouldn’t be willing to disclose that their weapons programs didn’t exist. Those who believed they did wouldn’t want to reveal the truth, and those who were in on the scam would have had to face the brutal wrath of Saddam had the truth been revealed. Despite the fact that this admission would have saved the regime, no one in Iraq would have been willing to speak up or the entire ediface would have crashed down on them.
Would this then mean that the war in Iraq was based on a fraud? No, the truth about Iraq is already clear. While WMDs were the most talked-about causus belli, they were not the only one. The invasion of Iraq ended a brutal dictatorship, restricted the flow of money, arms, and aid to terrorists, is creating fundamental changes for the better in the region, and has demonstrated the resolve of the United States to the world. In the end, if the WMDs were a deception, the deception came from the Iraqi side and not ours, and the right choice was made based on the evidence that existed at the time.
UPDATE: Michael Ledeen expresses some skepticism about the idea and wonders what implications such a discovery would have about our intelligence system. I agree that the complete lack of human intelligence at the CIA was one of the main reasons this theory remains plausible. What’s even more worrying is the CIA’s fundamental unwillingness to investigate theories that go against their preconceptions – we need a shakeup in the intelligence community, and we need it now.
