2008/09/19
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Rumsfeld wrong shock
by
Chris Ames
—
posted at
2008-09-19 08:51
last modified
2008-10-01 10:07
The Guardian has reported the publication of the International Institute of Strategic Studies' (IISS) annual strategic survey.
The IISS says that little has been done to correct the intelligence errors that led to the Iraq war, strangely blaming the spies rather than the spin doctors and politicians who misrepresented their analysis, adding certainty to uncertainty.
"The problem was not so much one of intelligence analysis as of the inability of the UK's analytical community to put themselves into the minds of those whose behaviour they were analysing," it says. Intelligence staff did not try to imagine what Saddam and his entourage were up to. "At no point did anyone consider the possibility that, to contradict former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, absence of evidence might in fact indicate evidence of absence," says the IISS.
The IISS is on tricky ground here, having published its own dossier on Iraq's non-existent wmd in September 2002. It said (I quote from the press release):
The retention of WMD capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime, for it has sacrificed all other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim.
What was that about putting yourself in the mind of those whose behaviour you are analysing? It now looks as Saddam merely wanted his neighbours to think he had wmd and that his obstructiveness was aimed at that.
- Category(s)
- Media Coverage
(IMO these two intertwined although fairly separate and distinct elements have been quite deliberately conflated.)
A second point is that Saddam knew full well he was never going to be let off the hook, the US administrations of both Bush I and Clinton had made that perfectly clear both by word and by deed, and he also knew that the CIA was out to assassinate him by dint of the fact that his own men had foiled the unfolding plot.
Therefore there was no 'carrot' attached to the 'stick' that was trying to force complete Iraqi compliance. Iraq went as far as it was able to show that the cupboard was now completely clean, although it didn't want necessarily want to admit to the full extent of its earlier WMD transgressions.
To repeat this unfounded claim is now tantamount to aiding and abetting in the cover-up of the true nature of the complex set of pathways leading to the road to war.
Please consider yourself to be suitably corrected!!
* A lot of people don't realise that Donald was Secretary of State for Defense twice over - the first time being 1975-77 under Gerald Ford, having prior to this been the White House Chief of Staff. He was also Ronald Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East from November 1983 to May 1984.