Former weapons inspector calls for intelligence reform

With the Iraq War stalled in its fourth year of action, policymakers and the public alike… With the Iraq War stalled in its fourth year of action, policymakers and the public alike may be forgiven for feeling a general sense of apathy toward the war topic.

But according to David Kay, a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, the time is urgent to learn from our intelligence mistakes in Iraq with Iranian-U.S. diplomacy veering toward a similar path.

“It’s important to learn these lessons, because the world doesn’t end with Iraq,” Kay said.

Kay’s lecture, sponsored by Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, drew such a large crowd of listeners that many crowd members were forced to stand in the rear of the room at Posvar Hall.

Kay’s long experience with the issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a central argument for the war’s formation, supplies him with his respected platform of authority. In the lead up to the first Gulf War, Kay led a team of U.N. weapons inspectors charged with accounting for Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities.

In a highly televised incident, Kay reached international fame when he and other inspectors were held hostage for a short period of time while Saddam Hussein tried to stop weapons inspections.

After the first Gulf War, Kay directed investigations through the rest of the 1990s intended to determine the extent of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

Kay’s lecture primarily dealt with the U.S. intelligence community’s mistakes in determining Iraq’s nuclear capability.

“First of all, we failed to notice changes in motivation,” Kay said. According to Kay, the intelligence community turned a blind eye to Hussein’s changing strategy.

Between 1991 and 1995, Iraq switched from shielding a nuclear program to hiding the fact that their nuclear program was inactive. Iraq featured “no large-scale nuclear activity after 1992, other than small [research and development] programs that never went anywhere,” Kay said.

He explained how when the United States had taken over Iraq in March 2003, interviews were conducted with Army officers concerning the whereabouts of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. What inspectors discovered was that each officer had the exact same story – their individual division did not have WMDs, but they were completely certain that other specific divisions did.

“Even high-ranking officers in the Iraqi Army did not know that Iraq did not have WMD,” Kay said.

Kay claimed that hiding this information was in Hussein’s best interest for the sake of maintaining domestic order. To keep the northern Kurds and the Shia in submission, Hussein had to maintain the reputation of his brutal military strength.

“Dictators fear most of all a loss of power, and this was very personal for Saddam,” he said.

The second mistake of the intelligence community, in Kay’s view, was the failure to notice that “the social structure had changed.”

Kay noted how Iraq had the largest middle class in the Middle East during the 1980s. With a highly successful university system and growing economy, Iraq was a much stronger nation governmentally.

By the 1990s, Iraq was held together by an unstable system of patron-client corruption. Kay mentioned that $6.7 billion was spent on palace construction during this time even though Hussein never slept in any of them. In effect, the palaces acted as a cover for Iraq’s decline.

By not observing the declining Iraqi social structure, the intelligence community failed to see the government’s tenuous hold on power, which in turn gave Iraq the impetus to promote a powerful outward stance.

Kay also talked about the intelligence community’s dismissal of information that pointed to Iraq’s lack of WMDs.

When the United States initiated a program in 2002 to interview relatives of Iraqi scientists who had been active in Iraq’s nuclear program in the 1980s, every individual said that his or her relatives were working on something else because the Iraq nuclear experiment had ended. However, the intelligence community discarded this information.

Segueing to the issue of Iran, Kay said that he hopes the intelligence community will reform in light of its past failures, but he remained skeptical. The fact that those who make major mistakes in intelligence do not lose their jobs is an example of how the whole system requires an overhaul, Kay said.

Referring to the U.S. experience in Iraq, Kay said, “There is a great danger in doing the very same thing for the very same reasons.”