Closing the ‘credibility gap’ in Iraq

NEW YORK, June 12 — The United States is launching into a new campaign to convince the world that something must be done about a dictatorial Muslim nation on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration, according to a senior administration official, is pressing the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer suspicions about Iran’s nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council. That’s the easy part. Far more difficult, officials and proliferation experts say, will be restoring the credibility of U.S. intelligence reports as a means for substantiating the kinds of allegations leveled against Iraq before the war.

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"All of these finds, and many others afterward, were discredited after further testing. Before long, Army and Marine units stopped making such reports based on field tests, which have shown an alarming tendency to produce false positives."

"Yet, in spite of the collapse of Saddam’s concealment system, the complete access to all facilities enjoyed by the inspectors and rich incentives being offered to Iraqi scientists and military officers willing to lead U.S. investigators to the “smoking gun,” no trace has been found of banned weaponry that was not already well known and catalogued by the U.N. inspection teams of the 1990s."

"A second, more damaging point: It appears that the Bush administration, understandably eager to maximize the importance of these finds, given its lack of luck elsewhere, deliberately quashed the opinions of U.S. and British intelligence analysts who suggested that the trailers don’t really appear to be mobile WMD labs after all."

"For the Bush administration domestically, this has led to quick moves to de-emphasize WMD and play up, instead, the fact that a brutal dictator has been ousted."

"But the complete disconnect between what U.S. officials claimed Iraq was doing and what subsequent investigation has been able to prove is going to be a major problem for U.S. diplomacy in the next crisis."

"For this administration’s future claims to have credibility, it’s important to find the WMD in Iraq. Otherwise, policy actions we might take to confront the regimes in Iran or North Korea won’t have credibility among our allies and the rest of the international community."

"The Economist, the British newsweekly, even suggested that this could mark the beginning of the end for Blair, who previously has been unassailable as a politician."

"In the longer term, even if President Bush avoids congressional hearings on the alleged politicization of intelligence, he may still find it difficult to avoid being cast as “the boy who cried wolf” the next time the United States feels the need to act pre-emptively."