The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

M A R C H 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 could the West have figured out how to affect Iraqi calculations? Certainly we knew in the fall of 2002 that Saddamwas not complying with the U.N. Security Council reso- lutions aimed at containing his regime. He had not allowed inspec- tions for almost four years and was actively working on ballistic missiles (with assistance from Russian techni- cians, we learned after the war). It was clear that Iraq was importing con- ventional military equipment from suppliers willing to violate U.N. sanctions. In post-9/11 Washington, Iraq was a problem to be solved, not managed. The Bush administration tried to ad- dress it through the United Nations — but only because it believed there was no way Saddam could (or would) com- ply with the U.N. resolutions. However, those who made that argument did not have much experience with inspec- tions on the ground. While U.N. in- spectors may not have believed Sad- dam was compliant, they certainly knew that it would be extremely hard to prove he was not. And at the United Nations, process can be an end in itself, becoming an endless en- deavor that never comes to resolution. Among intelligence analysts, the predominant hypothesis was that in the absence of inspections during the previous years, Saddam would have been crazy not to rebuild his weapons. The result was an extraordinary focus onWMDassessments and extremely limited supporting intelligence. (I would ob- serve that the data supporting assessments about current Iranian nuclear efforts dwarf the tidbits underlying the es- timates of Iraqi nuclear activity made in 2002.) When the Iraq Survey Group completed its analysis of the regime and its relationship to weapons programs in F O C U S The 2003 war had nothing to do with intelligence failures about Iraq’s WMD programs; it stemmed from errors of judgment in using intelligence.