Was Saddam a Threat or Not? - 30 January 2004

If I wanted to catch your attention at once I should say that not since a lanky, unknown, young American aviator dropped his rickety plane by night in the Paris airport, climbed out and said "I am Charles Lindbergh" has a totally unknown American hurtled overnight into the limelight of more countries than his own.

I'm talking about the lightning arrival on the scene of David Kay.

Only time and history will tell if that comparison is hopelessly melodramatic or a colourful reflection of the truth.

Of one thing I'm certain: while Charles Lindbergh's act was one of great personal courage it did not affect the political fate of any nation.

Dr Kay's single newspaper interview has deeply embarrassed the Bush administration and could prove to be the first strike to wound it.

David Kay was, until last week, the chief weapons inspector of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man who, you might say, as much as any American in government, keeps his secrets to himself.

However, Mr Kay resigned last Friday and made public the findings of his long association with the task of searching through Iraq for biological, chemical weapons and the materials, projects, objects, that might suggest a forthcoming nuclear arms programme.

The whole argument about the extent and imminence of Saddam's threat has been reduced or simplified in most countries to the question: did he or did he not have, in being or hidden away, weapons of mass destruction?

I've asked various people: what comes to mind with the mere utterance of that phrase?

And without exception the unconscious fact of the word "mass" creates a picture of some fairly massive weapons - a van or a truck - yes something like those two famous trailers that were reported.

At the time I suggested that a vial of nerve gas the size of a beer bottle could also, could it not, be defined as a weapon of mass destruction since it could paralyse the population of a capital city?

But in the language of the intelligence people, biochemicals were identified as a separate threat.

Now, what did Dr Kay conclude in the findings he reported to the Reuters agency?

First he said that throughout both the Clinton administration and the present one, the intelligence experts in America and many foreign countries were sure that Iraq had illegal weapons but that in his experience the Bush administration used no pressure to exaggerate Saddam's threat or prejudice the work of the CIA's inspectors.

But he said that the CIA and United Nations inspectors uncovered all there was of a nuclear programme and that after the Gulf War further nuclear efforts to make a crude bomb were a failure.

Also, well before the invasion of Iraq, Saddam had abandoned his biochemical weapons programme.

The day before Dr Kay appeared on the scene Mr Dick Cheney, the Vice-President of the United States, asked of the administration's critics: how about those two trailers that were found in Iraq? Surely they were conclusive proof of mobile, biological weapons.

Dr Kay on the day of his retirement immediately answered the vice-president. The trailer story was, he said, a fiasco. They were intended to produce hydrogen.

And before the invasion of Iraq there were no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons.

To report Dr Kay's findings as briefly and starkly as this is to leave the impression of a whistle blower - a government employee resigning and telling a tale to humiliate his former employer.

Quite wrong. Dr Kay is an amiable, solid, middle-aged man with a greying moustache who is so vastly experienced in his field and therefore so comfortable with himself that none of his answers showed a trace of irritation with mean or loaded questions.

On Wednesday morning Dr Kay appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to discover the rightness or wrongness of the intelligence information that led to America's pre-emptive invasion.

By the way at one point Dr Kay - making a general lament - thought that the whole technical language of war was obsolete. He doubted that "pre-emptive" had much meaning in a world of technology, when a war could start and end overnight.

What was very much in the forefront of the anxieties of both the Clinton and the present administration was the intentions of a likely attacker and the immediacy with which he could carry them out.

Dr Kay wondered if we'd noticed the chemical protection suits the men invading Baghdad were wearing.

No choice of the soldiers, they were very uncomfortable - especially in 115 degrees, he might have added - but they vividly reflected the fear of an unheralded use of chemical biological weapons by an enemy who, he said, had lied and cheated for decades and had used them with devastating results twice on his own neighbours.

Dr Kay was asked: if Saddam was in power today how fearful would he be as a threat to the United States and its allies?

The same, he said. Of course, he added, what he was reporting might well be repudiated when the right historian comes along.

There have always been intelligence failures in war, big and little.

For example, he said, in the Second World War American and British intelligence were fully agreed that the heavier the bombing of German cities the swifter was the decline in civilian moral.

After the war it was made quite clear that exactly the opposite was the truth - the more the bombing, the more morale strengthened, until, alas, the war could only be ended by continuous massive bombing of cities by two countries whose leaders, at the beginning, had sworn as much as possible to avoid civilian targets.

I have greatly simplified as accurately as I can the actual language in which this Senate investigation was being conducted.

There were times when we were befogged with jargon, not merely technical but the daily jargon of politicians and lawyers who were very verbose while being actually incapable of plain English.

Not thank the lord Senator John McCain. Do you remember the naval hero who survived five years of torture in Vietnam, ran for president, soundly defeated George W Bush in New Hampshire but lost out in the Southern primaries?

At one point Senator McCain, plainly fed up with the buffet of jargon on hand, said firmly: if Saddam were in power today would he be considered a threat to the United States?

Yes, said Dr Kay.

And wouldn't that be an intelligence failure?

It would, said Dr Kay.

Several times, both in the Reuters interview, and again in his Senate testimony on Wednesday, Dr Kay quite calmly rejected the notion - which one or two Democrats who were understandably eager to have him confirm - that, granting Dr Kay's recital of failures by his team in the field - the vast field of Iraq - he would agree that the primary responsibility rested with President Bush.

Dr Kay would not say so. Time and again he said that the United States and its allies did not in any way press the CIA and the foreign agents to find a good cause for war.

I'm just saying, he insisted, that these are facts on the ground. there was no evidence of biochemical weapons programme, and the very primitive nuclear programme had been abandoned.

At the same time we must not forget there had been biochemical weapons and raw material found and declared during the United Nations inspections through the 90s.

Dr Kay had no doubt that since 1998, perhaps even after the Gulf War, Saddam had shipped war-making materials to Syria.

Dr Kay finally said there were persuasive reasons for finding Saddam a serious threat but to justify the war on his possession of weapons of mass destruction was false because such information was false.

In the end Dr Kay said it all in seven words: "It turns out we were all wrong" - all meaning the American and British and other allied intelligence.

Dr Kay thus gave the president the escape hatch that the Hutton report opened to Prime Minister Blair.

Directly asked by a reporter next day if he would now withdraw the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse the president looked dazed and after six seconds simply dodged the question. He said he had regarded Saddam as a serious threat to the security of the United States.

Why, as I talk, he turned down a golden opportunity to claim rightly that he was misled is a mystery. He just doesn't want to blame anybody, including the CIA.

Do you remember the movie Casablanca, about a cynical American played by Humphrey Bogart who sets up a nightclub in Casablanca during its operation by the Vichy government?

He pretends to be indifferent to either side's winning the war but is secretly helping refugees from Hitler get to America.

Asked: why did you come to Casablanca? lazily he replied: I came for the waters.

"Meester Rick, there are no waters in Casablanca."

"I was misinformed."

When will the president quote Bogart?

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