Kay’ Sera, Sera

So which is it: Are America's spies a gaggle of fools for believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or is the Bush administration a gang of knaves for lying us into a war?

Take the spies-as-fools allegation first.

There was no substantial disagreement between the U.S. and other countries before the war about the likelihood — based on a history of deception — that Saddam Hussein retained weapons of mass destruction. Jacques Chirac warned last February about “the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq” and added “the international community is right . . . in having decided that Iraq should be disarmed.” David Kay has spoken of German and Russian intelligence reports that “painted a picture of Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.” The Israelis procured gas masks for every citizen. If Saddam actually disposed of all his weapons and stocks of chemical and biological agent well before last year's war began, many countries were deceived.

But we are now learning something further from Mr. Kay's recent disclosures: that there were quite specific pre-war indications of WMD — “reports of movement” of weapons themselves, of “weapons being assigned to specific units as well as specific locations.” This may explain the press reports that appeared in this newspaper and elsewhere late last year. Each captured Iraqi general being interrogated was convinced that, although his own unit had no chemical weapons, the units on his right and left flanks certainly did.

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There are several possible explanations for such indications of the presence of actual weapons. First, Saddam, knowing that he had destroyed his stockpiles, may have spread false stories that he knew would reach our ears in order to intimidate us. We pulled up short of Baghdad in 1991 and he may have thought such lies could help deter us again. He may also have wanted to maintain his reputation for having WMD, as Mr. Kay suggests, to look formidable in the Arab world and intimidate his own people. The oddest possibility Mr. Kay suggests is that Saddam may have been deceived himself by some of his own scientists into paying for non-existent WMD programs while the scientists pocketed the funds. This would amount to his having been our co-victim in a fraud run by other Iraqis.

A second possibility is that stockpiles were destroyed, but some only at the last minute — as war began — so that these latter did exist when the intelligence estimates were made. There have been intriguing press reports on this point, including a story in the New York Times last April about an Iraqi intelligence officer who said he was asked to destroy chemical weapons material just as the war started. Such a last-minute cleaning up would fit with reported Franco-Russian efforts early last year to help Iraq obtain a cease-fire coupled with thorough inspections.

Third, reports from both Mr. Kay and earlier ones from intelligence imagery analysts have indicated that some WMD-related material probably crossed into Syria early last year. So some stockpiles may have been exported as the war began. Others may have been hidden then.

But for last-minute destruction, shipment or hiding, the volumes of biological or chemical agent would have to have been small. Wouldn't stockpiles of WMD themselves be massive, as former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is fond of suggesting?

Actually, no. Why? Stockpiles would normally have been composed of biological or chemical “agents,” ready to be inserted into weapons. Take anthrax. The Iraqis admitted they had made 8,500 liters (8.5 tons), and Colin Powell in his February speech to the U.N. Security Council noted that the U.N. inspectors thought Saddam could have about three times as much. But even this larger amount would weigh only some 25 tons in liquid form — slightly more than one tractor-trailer load. If reduced to powder, as Mr. Powell suggested in his speech, it could be contained in a dozen or so suitcases. Saddam's “stockpile” of biological agent wasn't in his spider hole with him. But it could have been.

Where does this leave the idea of an outside investigation? There are six ongoing investigations in the U.S. — two in Congress, three in the Executive, and one under Charles A. Duelfer, Mr. Kay's successor. It would seem reasonable to let them finish before starting a seventh. But to jump ahead in a thought-experiment, how might such an outside review propose correcting the spies' foolishness, assuming it found such?

Take the solution most often proposed — including by Mr. Kay: Put less emphasis on technical intelligence and more on human collection. Well, suppose that CIA director George Tenet had emphasized human intelligence even more than he does already and had succeeded a year ago in recruiting a batch of Iraqi generals as spies — an incredible achievement. But then each one had honestly but falsely reported that Saddam had WMD, at specific locations. We would still have an intelligence failure. What Mr. Kay has described as Iraq's “vortex of corruption” seems to have created an intelligence twilight zone. Maybe better human intelligence could have detected that zone and helped foster more skepticism. There are probably a number of things that we will be able to learn from the pre-war history of WMD estimates. But the indignant should give the rest of us a hint about how U.S. intelligence should have proceeded to get to the truth about the Iraqi WMD programs in these circumstances.

What about the Bush administration's alleged knavery?

Mr. Kay dismisses the idea that knavery existed. There is, however, an element of misjudgment within the White House that should be noted. A year ago September it set out a sound policy for the post-Cold War era of rogue dictatorships, terrorism and proliferation of WMD. It said, essentially, that if a terrible dictatorship has both WMD programs and ties to terrorists it may be a candidate for preventive war — in no small measure because such a regime may supply WMD to terrorists. But in the run-up to the war, instead of equally emphasizing the nature of Saddam's regime with its massive human-rights violations and its ties to terrorist groups, the administration focused almost exclusively on WMD, especially in Mr. Powell's speech to the Security Council.

It has been suggested that bureaucratic compromises drove that decision — since WMD was the one issue all relevant agencies could agree on. But the history of murder, rape and torture by Saddam's regime is one of the most extraordinary in human history. If one counts the Iranians who died in his war of aggression in the 1980s, he has killed two million people — about 10 times the number killed by Slobodan Milosovic, with whom the Clinton administration went to war twice in the 1990s on human-rights grounds.

And Iraq's ties with terrorist groups in the '90s are clear. Even if one focuses only on Iraqi ties to Abu Nidal and Ansar-al-Islam, the requirements of the administration's policy would seem to be met. And in the fall of 2002, Mr. Tenet wrote to Congress outlining a decade of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in poisons, gases and explosives. There was no need to show that Iraq participated in 9/11 or even that it directed al Qaeda in any operations — describing occasional cooperation of the sort that is well chronicled was quite sufficient. The Baathists and al Qaeda were like two Mafia families — they hated, insulted and killed one another, but readily cooperated from time to time against a common enemy. Why not say so?

Such a three-part emphasis on human rights, terrorist ties and WMD programs would have been solidly in line with the president's own explicit policy. A three-legged stool is more stable than a one-legged one, but for some reason the administration decided not to make all three parts of its case in justifying the decision to go to war. As a result, its very heavy emphasis on WMD to the exclusion of the other two bases of its strategy has left the administration vulnerable to the failure to find WMD stockpiles. Whoever caused that decision to be made may have succeeded in papering over some bureaucratic feuding, but reaped a political whirlwind.

Mr. Woolsey, director of Central Intelligence from 1993-95, is a vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton.