KENNETH POLLACK ON WMDS–“WHAT WENT WRONG”: Must-read. Via Oxblog I think.

…In 2002 I wrote a book called The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in which I argued that because all our other options had failed, the United States would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered the question of why we didn’t find in Iraq what we were so certain we would.

The U.S. intelligence community’s belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush’s inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. It was first advanced at the end of the 1990s, at a time when President Bill Clinton was trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from Iraq was growing. …

U.S. government analysts were not alone in these views. …

But it appears that Iraq may not have had any actual weapons of mass destruction. …

Figuring out why we overestimated Iraq’s WMD capabilities involves figuring out what the Iraqis, especially Saddam Hussein, were thinking and doing throughout the 1990s. …

The intelligence community’s overestimation of Iraq’s WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush Administration handled the intelligence. …

What we have learned about Iraq’s WMD programs since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed beforehand.

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