State Dept. employee discusses “war game”

Although Greg Thielmann came to Pitt to give a lecture, “How we got it wrong on Iraq,” he made… Although Greg Thielmann came to Pitt to give a lecture, “How we got it wrong on Iraq,” he made it clear that he considers the title a misnomer

“The public had no idea the extent of dissent within the intelligence community” regarding the question of Iraq’s threat, he said.

Thielmann, former director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence, said the “Bush administration exaggerated the threat of Saddam Hussein in the build-up to the Iraq war.” In his address at the University’s School of Law Monday, Thielmann charged that the administration’s “war game was thinly disguised.”

Thielmann was a Foreign Service officer for 25 years before he retired in September 2002 from his position at the State Department. His office had highest security clearance and was directly responsible for analyzing the intelligence on the Iraqi weapons threat, as well as for working with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In a Public Broadcasting Service interview conducted Aug. 12, 2003, Thielmann directly accused the White House of “systematic, across-the-board exaggeration” of intelligence in making the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

“Senior officials made statements which I can only describe as dishonest,” he said in the interview.

On Monday night, Thielmann echoed this accusation.

“The intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was entirely politicized,” he said.

It was the opinion of Thielmann and some of his colleagues that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States, or even its neighbors.

“The rhetorical approach was carefully constructed in the build-up to war, yet the rational of [weapons of mass destruction] was dismissed afterward by saying that the removal of Saddam Hussein was a good thing,” he said.

Unequivocal statements by the administration, Thielmann said, made it appear as if Iraq was in fact “an imminent threat.”

Thielmann argued that Powell was put in a “difficult position” when he was told to address the United Nations Security Council to make the case for war. In this address, according to the United States Mission to the United Nations Web sites, Powell said, “Every statement I make today is backed up by solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

But Thielmann said that Powell’s own uncertainties about the intelligence “were consistently overruled by the hawks of the administration.”

Thielmann said that it seems Hussein was in fact playing a “double game.”

“He wanted to appear as if he posed no threat, to soften the sanctions [imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War], yet it was in his interest for others to think he had weapons, as a deterrent to aggression.”

Thielmann pointed to top U.N. weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix’s analogy of this strategy.

“It is like putting up a ‘Beware of dog’ sign, without getting a dog,” Blix said.

Questioned about the potential learning curve for the U.S. intelligence services from the “WMD fiasco,” as he referred to it, Thielmann observed that it appears “pretty flat.” The lack of penalties for leading a nation to war on false pretexts will reduce the utility as a learning experience, he said.

“There are some penalties, like the hundreds of billions [of dollars] in debt [and] thousands of lives lost, but the administration does not feel that,” he said. “But there is always Nov. 2.”

Thielmann said he felt “completely certain that America is less secure now than it was before the war.” Although he admits that “there may be benefits in the future for the removal of Saddam Hussein,” at this point, he says, the ongoing conflict in Iraq “is the best ever recruiting drive for Al-Qaida.”

Thielmann is working closely with Pitt’s Ridgway Center in its research on the United States’ shift in foreign policy after the Bush Administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy, widely referred to as the “Bush Doctrine.”

The current project studies the United States’ role in staging “pre-emptive military intervention,” and examines the impact of the doctrine on global stability and international law — specifically, how rhetorical practices can sustain and legitimize the doctrine’s implementation.

At the close of his talk on Monday, Thielmann was asked why America attacked Iraq, if the administration was not as concerned as it said it was about the imminent threat posed by Iraq.

“Israel, oil … Freud? All I know is that it was not WMD,” he said.