The failure by the United States to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq raises disturbing questions for Australians. Our intelligence agencies should be reeling from the massive failure in US and British intelligence. Why was their advice so wrong? Was it simply incompetence, or was it the result of political interference?
One hopes our agencies are also deeply concerned about the cavalier attitude of our government which seems so blasé about such a catastrophic intelligence failure. Whatever happened to political accountability? And our military personnel must be wondering why their lives should be so incompetently placed at risk.
Ignoring the UN teams that had for years been looking for any weapons of mass destruction, the US sent the 1400-member Iraq Survey Group to scour the country for these weapons. After five months, its CIA representative, David Kay, reported in October 2003 that they had found none. Kay wanted another $US600 million to continue the search, bringing the total cost to about $US1 billion. Few observers now think any significant WMDs will be found, but it is a measure of the desperation of the Bush administration that it is prepared to consider squandering such sums when they could be much better spent in reconstructing Iraq.
President Bush has changed the rhetoric and is now making much of the fact that Iraq had retained a capability to make such weapons, claiming that this justified the war. But the existence of such capability is news to no-one, since the US and other Western countries helped supply many of these weapons programs in the first place. As the quip goes, the Western countries still have many of the receipts for such weapons and programs. It seems that Saddam had destroyed his chemical and biological weapons by the mid-1990s, and that he had no active nuclear program.
Even after Saddam in the 1980s had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranians, the US continued to supply Iraq with weapons and support, especially critical battlefield intelligence. It is during this period that Saddam perpetrated most of his mass killings. The US did not then call for humanitarian intervention to overthrow him. Moreover, the US did nothing to protect members of the Muslim Shii sect from Saddam, when it provoked a revolt in southern Iraq after the Kuwait war. Thousands of Shii died while the US forces watched. No wonder that new US attempts to justify the invasion