They've Been Lying since 1991

by emptywheel

I just finished Scott Ritter's Iraq Confidential. And if Ritter is to be believed, the lies and deceptions that Bush used to get us into war extend much further, back to the end of the Gulf War and the beginning of the sanctions regime. The biggest reason not to believe Ritter is that he seems to be making the same argument as the Iraqis long made--that the inspections were a farce. But the vast majority of evidence discovered since "Mission Accomplished" supports his claims. As Seymour Hersh notes in the introduction, "The most important thing to know about Scott Ritter, the man, is that he was right."

You wouldn't know it, though, given the tepid reception of the book. Ritter's allegations are disturbing, a lot more disturbing than those made by Richard Clarke. But I've not read one review that describes what Ritter demonstrates. I think that's because Ritter states his main claim timidly. He says the inspection regime was not designed to succeed, that it was simply designed to pressure Saddam and lead to regime change.

But what Ritter shows is something different. He shows that the US (and I'll look at who within the US in a bit) actively undermined the inspections, peddled sloppy intelligence, spied on UN inspectors, and exposed other spies. Many of the appalling things Bush has done to prepare the way for an Iraq war are really just par for the course.

Overview

Over the course of the book Ritter describes the impossible situation of UNSCOM. On one side, you have the Iraqis, willing to admit they destroyed WMDs but desperately attempting to hide the full extent of the weapons programs they had had. By 1998, Iraq penetrated UNSCOM sufficiently to know almost all details of the inspections before they happened. On the other side, you have the US, giving token support to UNSCOM's mission, but ensuring through a variety of means that it could never be successful. UNSCOM, for the US, provided a means to carry out regime change.

While UNSCOM and the United Nations were focused on disarming Iraq, Washington had already had its eyes set on another objective – getting rid of Saddam. President Clinton had inherited from the Bush administration not only a policy of sanctions-based containment, but also a secret “lethal finding,” signed in October 1991, which authorized the CIA to create conditions inside Iraq to facilitate the elimination of Saddam Hussein. (127-8)

At the UN and in the UK, you have a number of people who really believed in the mission. And in Israel, you have pragmatic intelligence professionals realizing they could cooperate with UNSCOM to get the best intelligence available on Iraq (even if they intended to use it for aggressive ends). And in the midst of it all, you've got Ritter, who repeatedly trusts the US too much and thereby enables the US to undermine UNSCOM's purpose to achieve its own ends.

One contention Ritter makes echos Iraqi claims. The US staffed UNSCOM with members of CIA's Operations Planning Cell (OPC), the CIA's special forces, as members of the inspection teams. While having people with special forces backgrounds provide the inspection teams with additional security (particularly in case of hostage-taking), they report all their data--and collect their own--to the US. And when the inspection teams make significant progress--as when Iraq revealed the extent of their missile program in 1991--the US intelligence plants undermine the credibility of (what we now know to be) honest and accurate reporting. This is a very simple ploy to use UNSCOM as a means to get access to sensitive Iraqi sites, then use that access to ensure the inspection program as cover for CIA's own programs.

Electronic Intercepts

But things get much worse when Ritter attempts to use communication intercepts to learn how the Iraqis concealed their weapons programs. Ritter learns the Iraqis are responding to their inspections and he decides to learn how, figuring that could provide the best evidence of whether there still were weapons programs. So he decides to launch inspections into some of the most sensitive sites in Iraq and eavesdrop on the Iraqis to find out what was really going on.

But the problem is he needs US technical assistance to pull off the eavesdropping.

At first, when he asks the CIA for assistance, they try to put him off. They give him equipment, but basically just crap Ritter could have bought himself at Radio Shack, thereby forcing him to cancel an imminent inspection. Eventually, though, they seem to come around, providing them better equipment and training on the equipment. They even have their own engineer put up an antenna in Iraq before Ritter knows they had gotten him one. Oops! Should have been a tipoff, but it wasn't.

Ritter also needs the CIA to help him interpret the data. So he gives the recordings to the CIA and awaits their analysis. And gets nothing more than a few-page report, stating that no worthwhile data had been received. It isn't until he demands the CIA return his data and has the MI6 interpret it that Ritter realizes he'd been duped.

Meanwhile, the CIA exposes the British experts manning the actual surveillance in Iraq, as Ritter discovers when the Brits let him read a "top secret" communication they've been given..

I looked at the subject line: “UN COMMUNICATIONS INTERCEPT OPERATION UP AND RUNNING IN BAGHDAD”. I glanced down at the list of addressees. The document had been sent around the world, to every embassy and military headquarters the USA maintained. I read the report itself, which detailed the mission being carried out, who the personnel involved were, by name, and what their nation of origin was. This was more than just letting people know a SIGINT operation was underway. This was blowing its cover to smithereens.

Now, the CIA sabotages Ritter's intercept system as cover for the (ultimately failed) 1996 coup. Later, after the failure of the 1996 coup, the Brits discover what has really been going on with the intercepts.

“…we came across an intercept from some of our assets in the Middle East of an Iranian agent in Baghdad communicating to his home station....According to this intercept, the Iranian—who was apparently conducting his own signals survey—reported that he had detected evidence of a CIA communications intercept operation underway inside the UN Headquarters in Baghdad. This operation collected data which was then compressed and ‘burst’ transmitted to U-2 aircraft when they overflew Baghdad.” If this were true, then the CIA was operating its own version of the SCE [electronic intercept] team inside Iraq, using UNSCOM as a cover.” (216)

The MI6 discover an odd burst transmission on the UNSCOM SCE tapes. They learn via some of their other assets in the Middle East that the Iranians had determined this was a CIA tranmission. That is, the CIA is conducting an intercept program (as it turns out, in support of their coup plan) at the same time as UNSCOM.

But it gets worse. As the Brits explain to Ritter, not only is the CIA carrying on its own intercept program, they had ensured that the UNSCOM intercept program would do no more than provide cover for CIA--they had made sure that UNSCOM would collect no usable data.

“However, when we began signal processing of the UNSCOM 150/155 tapes, we found that the quality of the signal was extremely poor, making any technical processing too laborious to be of any use. GCHQ questioned Gary and his team about the methodologies taught them by the CIA in Virginia in February last year, and we discovered that these techniques actually were designed to deliberately distort the signal, making the tapes all but useless.”

[snip]

“However, our assessment of this situation is that whatever information was collected by NSA and shared with us, although represented as coming from the [UNSCOM] SCE product, was in fact coming from another, parallel effort, and that our boys are simply being used as a cover operation for whatever it was the CIA was doing.” (217)

In other words, the CIA exposed the British SIGINT operators to Saddam's wrath, all the while making sure that they couldn't get anything of value for their efforts.

Finally, in 1998, just before the withdrawal of the inspectors, the Clinton Administration uses UNSCOM to attempt  to create a casus belli with the Iraqis. They insist Ritter (although Albright actually objected to Ritter's role) inspect the Iraqi Defense Ministry, a site the Iraqis had long said would be cause for war. Butler even schedules plans for a "crisis" around the Clinton Administration's timetable for a bombing campaign.

Using a marker on the easel, Butler drew a chart on the whiteboard listing two timelines. One he labeled "Inspections", the other "Military Action". Down the side of the board he worte out the dates in March from the first to the fifteenth. Butler circled number 8. "We need to have a crisis with Iraq by this date," he said," tapping the board with his pen, "so that the US can complete its bombing campaign by this date," his pen moving to circle the number 15. "I have been told that the US has a bombing campaign prepared which needs to be completed in time for the Muslin religious holiday that begins on 15 March." (272)

The US was already bringing in battle groups when, after Ritter said a denial of the inspection would be the death of UNSCOM inspections, the Iraqis let him into their Defense Ministry. Thus the reasons for Ritter's subsequent treatment as a pariah.

Scott Ritter's Naivete

As I've suggested, many of these shocking details are presented without the context, the full implications for our relations with Iraq. This is partly because Ritter's first person narration is mediated through what seems to have been a mighty slow realization of how much the CIA was screwing him over. Many of the details were only filled in, it is clear, after the end of the current Iraq war, when Ritter was able to interview people in the Mukhabarat and CIA who could explain what really transpired.

And then, several times in the narrative, there are difficult events where our narrator, Ritter, must admit how thoroughly he was taken in. How do you explain, for example, that by giving estimates of what Iraq might be hiding (things like VX nerve gas and anthrax weaponization--all the things which appeared in Colin Powell's presentation to the UN), Ritter accidentally gave the CIA the basis for claims that Iraq did have an active CW/BW program?

This entire process was complicated by the fact, as relayed to me by Burt, that my concealment paper had just been adapted as an official intelligence report for use inside the CIA’s intelligence analysis system. What had been prepared as a guideline for investigative operations, postulating the hypothetical existence of various proscribed weapons, had instead become a foundation of “fact” for intelligence analysts and government policymakers. Burt told me that the most popular reading of my paper was the annexes on hidden weapons and documents. What had always been speculation had now become an “official UNSCOM position.” (248)

How do you explain that Ritter told Chalabi--who was already manufacturing dissidents who told the US precisely what they wanted to hear--precisely what he needed to know to be able to "fill in the blanks" without being discovered as a fraud?

This should have sent alarm bells sounding in my head. In the intelligence world, one never gives away the complete picture of what you know and what you don't know; this too easily allows you to be manipulated by sources which miraculously "confirm" data you already have while filling in the gaps in the intelligence picture. However, I was under pressure from Charles Duelfer to make this new relationship work, and I proceeded to brief CHalabi on UNSCOM's understand about what Iraq might be hiding. This included speculation about the possible existence of mobile biological laboratories and agent production facilities. (268)

How do you explain Ritter's general acceptance of the CIA data collection going on in plain sight?

In short, Ritter never tells us the true extent to which he was gamed--by both the Iraqis and the US. As a result, he (presumably, inadvertently) hides the full extent to which the US set up this stupid Iraq war from 1991.

Who Was Behind This?

Ritter never explains clearly who in the US undermined UNSCOM, beyond stating that regime change was the policy of the US from the end of the Gulf War (that is, including Bush and Clinton). But there are a number of interesting characters who have since shown up.

There seems to have been factions within the CIA. Just before one inspection in 1993, the OPC guys on the inspection team propose new targets, completely different from those recommended by the Nonproliferation unit of CIA (NPC, the precursor to WINPAC) and based on information from Kurdish groups in the north. One of the special forces guys says of NPC,

"Look,  Scott, I'm just being honest here, but the intelligence behind the GPR mission is crap." I could feel my stomach churning. "The analysts at the Non-Proliferation Cetner haven't a clue what they are doing. To be honest, this stuff about buried missiles is pure guesswork, based on second-rate defector information." (79)

The dispute suggests one faction favored the obstructionism and the other did not--and Ritter later makes clear that the OPC members were part of the CIA's obstruction. However, both the NPC intelligence and the OPC intelligence proved baseless, so perhaps the factionalism existed within support for the obstructionist program.

Within the CIA, Ritter names some names. James Woolsey was the newly-appointed DCI when Ritter was getting really bad (and conflicting) intelligence from CIA; when Ritter came back with details that refuted the intelligence, Woolsey dismissed it, simply making his unsupported allegations somewhat more conservative. John Deutsch, under whom the coup was planned, seemed to be continuing the approach established earlier by Woolsey, definitely undermining the task of UNSCOM. Ritter also names Steve Richter, then head of the CIA's Near East and South Asian (NESA) group in DO and former Amman station chief, as the sponsor for the coup and the instigator of much of the sabotage against UNSCOM.

Much earlier in the process, in 1991 and 1992, State was complicit with the placement of CIA's OPC members onto UNSCOM teams. Ritter names one surprising name for the person at UN sponsoring this behavior--Richard Clarke, then head of State's Political Military Affairs Bureau. And while Ritter makes no mention of him, it's worth remembering that John Bolton (assisted by Fred Fleitz) was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs--which has a significant liaison role with the UN--until 1993.

And then, later in the process, Ritter identifies the hardliners in the Clinton Administration. More than anyone else, Madeleine Albright used the UNSCOM inspections to invent reasons to attack Iraq. On at least one occasion, she overruled Sandy Berger on decisions relating to UNSCOM. But Berger, too, was personally involved in using UNSCOM as an excuse for military attacks.

Ritter also makes it clear that Charles Duelfer, Deputy to UNSCOM chief and later Ritter's direct report on the intercept project (and author, more recently, of the report explaining where Saddam's WMDs all went), was working for the US rather than UNSCOM, his ostenisble employer. When Ritter confronted him witht he way the US sabotaged the UNSCOM SCE program, Duelfer did nothing (and seemed to know about the sabotage already).

Duelfer looked at me, frustrated. “Scott, I can’t make it any clearer than this. I cannot discuss this. This never happened. And if I were you, I’d drop the matter right now. If you go forward, even to tell [then UNSCOM head] Ekéus, you will be opening a huge bag of trouble for you. I would imagine you’d have the FBI come down on you very very hard, and you don’t want that. Take my advice and back off.” (222)

Ritter is less clear about the allegiances of Richard Butler, head of UNSCOM from 1997 to 1999. He talks aggressively when he first comes in, then backs off and supports slower inspections, seemingly at the behest of Britain and the US. And, in the end, he stops Ritter's concealment inspections. But it is unclear whether Butler made these decisions because the US successfully lobbied him to make these choices, or whether his allegiance to US interests (though he is Australian) were more direct.

And finally, Ritter gives a nice little tidbit on the role of--who else!--Judy Miller in gaming UNSCOM. He suggests UNSCOM first made contact with Chalabi at her recommendation.

Through [conservative supporters], Chalabi was introduced to Judith Miller, a journalist with the New York Times, and to Charles Duelfer, the UNSCOM deputy executive chairman. Duelfer, a long-time “background” source for Judith Miller (they would have long lunches where Duelfer would provide her with off-the-record “inside information” about what was happening behind the scnenes in UNSCOM and Iraq was convinced that Chalabi was a goldmine of useful data that UNSCOM desperately needed to get its hands on. (259)

Given my earlier questions about how Duelfer reported questionable Chalabi-Miller finds, this is curious information indeed.

I have always known the Clinton Administration withdrew inspectors in 1998 to facilitate a bombing campaign. I've known Clinton was pursuing regime change. I've known that Alrbight was looking for some rationale to extend the sanctions regime against the increasing opposition of the Security Council. But Ritter portrays a Bush I and Clinton Administration that much more actively sabotaged the stated intent of the UN ... and did so using some of the same tactics we abhor in Bush II.

Comments

[DHinMI]

One reason why Ritter's book may not be getting much attention is the legal trouble he found himself in. I can't remember the exact nature of the charges--I remember reading about it in a New Yorker article around 2002-2003--but iirc it was something really bad and salacious, I think concerning downloaded images of child pornography. He vehemently claimed he had been framed, and the charges did seem a little suspect. But at the same time, the New Yorker article presented him as not quite the most stable guy you'd ever meet, and more than a little inconsistent.

Assessing Ritter's claims requires one to also assess his veracity and reliability. I suspect that for many people it's just too complicated, so the result is they don't engage his claims all that seriously so as to avoid being seen as accepting the claims of a potentially dubious (and if the kiddie porn stuff is to be believed, depraved) source.

[emptywheel]

Yes, I'm aware of the allegations (and I'm looking for the reasonably good refutation I've seen, which means I'm mostly wandering through Stephen Hayes' accusations against Ritter, which doesn't say much for the accusations). To Ritter's credit, he never makes the claim (at least not in the book) that the charges were retaliation for his unwillingness to cooperate with this--the closest he comes is with Duelfer's warning.

That may also be one of the reasons he backs away from describing what was going on in the most direct way. Also, note he footnotes extensively. Most of this is sourced to published UNSCOM papers, as well as interviews with some Iraqis after the fact.

[p.lukasiak]

Although its been pretty obvious for quite some time that the US was sabotaging the UNSCOM inspections, I think that "regime change" had little to do with it. The US didn't want the inspections process to succeed (i.e. certify that Iraq was WMD-free) because that would eliminate the rationale for the presence of the US military bases in Saudi Arabia.

9-11 made the continued presence of Saudi bases untenable -- the Saudi Royals' support of the madrasses that were preaching jihad against America was a direct result of the presence of those bases -- the jihadists kept their focus off the Saudi Royals and their complicity with the US because they were "paid off."

Saudi co-operation in the war on terror was only possible if those bases were closed -- the radical clerics whom the Royals had nurtured would have stood for nothing less.

The war in Iraq became "necessary" because of the US "need" for middle-east military bases. It really was all about the oil -- about the US need to ensure its access to middle-east oil reserves with its military presence.

[emptywheel]

Here's the porn story. Not clear from the article whether it was factual or not.

[Susan S]

(Not sure what happened when I posted this a few minutes ago. It seems to have disappeared.)

Ritter was on C-Span last week and he said the charges against him had been dropped. The way the Bushies are known to go after the messenger, I wouldn't put it past them to have planted evidence against him. That said, I would take the allegations against Ritter with a huge grain of salt.

[emptywheel]

p luk

The inspections Ritter is speaking of is those that took place from 1991 until 1998--under Bush I and Clinton. While I agree that it's not all about regime change (or, might rather be described in terms of maintaining control over key states in the ME, in the case of Iraq by ensuring you've got a friendly dictator), it's definitely not a post-9/11 concern for Saudi bases. (Note, too, that Saudi Arabia is alleged to have supported teh 1996 coup attempt, again, don't know if that's true.)

[emptywheel]

Here's an interesting PBS interview, from before the war. It's an interesting take on what Ritter believed before he interviewed the Mukhabarat guys and after (and also what he was willing to admit afterwards--he is asked in the Frontline interview about the intercept program, and he doesn't respond).

[emptywheel]

And here's a William Arkin post slamming Ritter. It's not so much that he finds Ritter disingenuous. It's that he thinks Ritter was responsible (not least for the way he worked outside of normal channels) for the failure of UNSCOM.

But on the central point, Arkin backs up much of what Ritter says:

A bit of full disclosure: In 1998, I was hired by the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to look into allegations that UNSCOM was being used to collect information for the United States above and beyond that needed by weapons inspectors to catch the Iraqis in their deceits. UNSCOM was being used, and had set up a variety of surveillance programs designed to support the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The "close in" eavesdropping scheme was able to monitor short-range radio and telephone calls in Baghdad and thus "map" Saddam Hussein's inner circle and guard force. (For targeting purposes, the quality of the intelligence was so good that after UNSCOM left Iraq in December 1998, the Clinton administration just couldn't resist undertaking Operation Desert Fox, the now infamous "wag the dog" attack whose real purpose -- perhaps not so far fetched -- was to kill Saddam Hussein or at least to sow enough confusion and disruption in his guard force to open the way for a coup.)

FWIW, one of Arkin's big complaints with Ritter is the way he cooperated with the Israelis. I agree with the complaint. It's disturbing to me that, under the guise of a UN inspection, Israel was given highly sensitive intelligence on Iraq.

[emptywheel]

Last link, I promise (maybe).

But here's a 1999 Barton Gellman article, apparently sourced to Kofi Annan, detailing the use of UNSCOM's intercept program.

[KM]

EW, was just about to post about Gellman's article (actually, it's an investigative series -- see e.g. this).

It's not just a theory, it's established fact that the U.S. and CIA used UNSCOM to spy on Iraq. Since Gellman's series, it's been publicly acknowledged by Richard Butler and Rolf Ekéus, and is the main reason for the termination of UNSCOM and its replacement with UNMOVIC. The UN's Amorim Report, which marked the UNSCOM-UNMOVIC transition, has a backhanded, diplomacy-speak reference to this motivation for the transfer. Iraq's discovery of the spying is an essential part of the background to the pitched confrontations of 1998.

Among other things, the information gleaned was used to track Saddam's whereabouts for the purpose of trying to assassinate him.

Note that even Ekéus has accused the U.S. of having deliberately obstructed inspections.

[emptywheel]

Thanks KM

Can I just say Barton Gellman rocks? I rag on WaPo with the best of them, but I've developed a very acute sense of appreciation for Gellman and Dafna Linzer this year, in addition to my existing appreciation for Pincus and Priest and Milbank (to say nothing of Froomkin, who, as we all know, is not a White House reporter).

Now if we could only do something about Steno Sue and VandeHei.

[John Casper]

emptywheel, I appreciate your support for Milbank. I will chalk the Froomkin snark in his last WaPo online chat up to the scary political reality of having to work under a Kool-Aid chugging editor such as John WATB Harris.

[emptywheel]

That second one maps very closely to Ritter's book, KM, although Ritter could only be a source for about half of the allegations in the Gellman article.

One thing Gellman didn't include, but Ritter did: that the CIA deliberately gave UNSCOM equipment that would produce useless intercepts.

I'm also curious by the difference/similarity in the portrayal of allegiances. Gellman also portrays Duelfer as the linchpin of this. And, at least when Gellam spoke to him, Butler was playing dumb. Given the way that Richard Clarke and more recently Bolton have forced UN people out of positions, I wonder if we handpicked Butler for the job.

[KM]

Many, many other comments to make on this post/subject (I'm glad you've raised it, EW). Probably won't get to many of them.

Your title is right. The Clinton Administration deliberately engaged in systematic lying about Iraq and WMD. That's a fact and is not subject to dispute. They played a game with inspections (and "WMDs") just as much as the Iraqis and Saddam did. Furthermore, many of the more systematic misrepresentations (e.g. of UNSCOM and IAEA reports) that the Clinton and Blair admins came habitually to rely on were picked up on, vastly extended, and twisted to new purposes by the fanatics currently in the White House in their obsessive drive for war.

IMHO critics of the Bush Admin and of this deluded and reprehensible war need to come to grips with and acknowledge the sins of the Clinton Admin, and the sense in which its games and lies, created for their own purposes, created a context of public (academic, policy) opinion, and a network of false but extremely widely held "truisms" about Iraq and WMD, which vastly facilitated the current neocon grand project. But this does not mean that there is some kind of equivalence between the two Administrations and what they have done (and sought to do).

The use by people like Ritter of neocon neologisms like "regime change" to describe the motivations of the Clinton Admin vis-a-vis Iraq is unfortunate, not so much because it's wrong, but because it too tends to encourage this notion of equivalence of purpose, and of means, between the two Admins. "Regime change" might fit the Bush I and Clinton Admins but it does a damn poor job of covering the full-fledged neocon agenda, and the many reasons for the unprovoked and thoroughly fabricated war against Iraq in 2003. And nothing the Clinton Admin ever did or said can touch the most massive, systematic, ruthless and brazen campaign of deception orchestrated by the Bush II Admin in pimping their trumped-up "crisis" and subsequent invasion.

[KM]

EW -- two quick comments.

Colum Lynch of the Boston Globe broke the story before Gellman, I believe. The Globe and Post series ran at roughly the same time and brought public attention to the spying.

Butler of course denied the spying vociferously at the time, but has since acknowledged it (e.g. in his memoirs).

[p.lukasiak]

The reason i don't really buy the "regime change" explanation for US actions under Clinton is the same reason "regime change" made no sense as an excuse for the war in Iraq.

Namely--getting rid of Saddam represented a unknown---but potentially disasterous---risk, and Clinton was too smart to take that kind of risk.

If we actually wanted to get rid of Saddam, we'd have been nicer to him...and knock him off when he let his guard down.

Having the right enemies is far more useful than having the right friends. Saddam was the perfect enemy, and Clinton exploited that perfection to the hilt.

[emptywheel]

KM

The primary difference, it seems to me, is in the way regime change fit numerous objectives in the Bush II era, but just one (enforcing discipline among our client states) in the two earlier administrations. With 43, you've got the Oedipus factor, the reelection factor, the personal enrichment factor, a very different status for the dollar and for the Saudi relationship.

And I think the caution about the term regime change (although Ritter seems to get it from the 1991 Finding) is accurate. What 41 and Clinton aspired to do was replace Saddam with a better behaved strongman. What 43 claimed to want to do was get rid of the Baathists altogether.

[emptywheel]

p luk

I'm not sure I understand. Do you believe the 1996 coup attempt was just a front? Just something to put Saddam further on the defensive? And for that we'd be willing to lose 800 assets in Iraq?

[Smokestack]

Another excellent post -- must commend again the way the mind of EW works.

Lest we forget, the Neocon apparatus was fairly functional during the Clinton regime. The whole bogus load of intelligence made the rounds well before Bush II took over, as part of the overall anti-Saddam propaganda campaign, which began when Bush I infuriated Neocons by NOT colonizing Iraq back in 1991. (They turned hard against Bush I during the 1992 elections.)

Wurmser & Perle's 1996 "Clean Break" paper was the public tip of the Neocon propaganda iceberg, nicely summarizing the overall strategy.

In the present debates on Iraq, we now see the beauty of the Neocon Iraq project -- Bush II can dig up plentiful quotes from Democrats who've bashed the Saddam-Menace over the past 14 years. They all swallowed the same Neocon propaganda. And the "hypocrisy" and "rewriting history" charges are effective, unfortunately.

As president, Clinton bought the whole load as well, of course, but he wasn't whole-hog committed to taking out Saddam. He lacked the fever. His tendency towards half-measures served him well, on this one -- though it should be said he was lacking in suitable pretext.

The events of 9/11 provided the pretext, at long last, and also ended doubts as to which way America would go after the end of the Cold War, regarding its policy in the Middle East, where Oil and Israel have often been in conflict.

The Education of Scott Ritter -- he went straight from hero to goat as he began to realize what was afoot. He was naieve, and just idealistic enough to get himself in trouble. The above EW link shows how his former friends play ball.

Too many Americans shared Ritter's naievete back around 2003 -- but since then have learned quite a bit more about that iceberg. I wonder if it will be enough to keep us out of Iran & Syria, et al...

[p.lukasiak]

I'm not sure I understand. Do you believe the 1996 coup attempt was just a front? Just something to put Saddam further on the defensive? And for that we'd be willing to lose 800 assets in Iraq?

I'd say that it was more like the Iraqi version of the Bay of Pigs. I don't think that the Clinton administration engineered the coup attempt, but merely bought into the assurances of expatriots like Allawi that there was all this support for a coup inside Iraq within the Iraqi military.

But it turned out that a whole lot of the people "involved" in the abortive coup plot were agent provacateurs working for Saddam's intelligence services --- which is why on the date that the coup was supposed to happen, all of the people who were involved in the coup were suddenly gone.

BTW, where did you get the "800 assets" number from? Is that the number of people purged/killed by Saddam in 1996 when the whole plot was discovered?

[emptywheel]

p luk

Bay of Pigs is an analogy many use for the coup, both Neocons and Iraqis. So it might make sense.

Yes, 800 assets is one of the numbers I've seen. Ritter describes it as one battalion of the Special Republican Guard, plus some. Which is not exactly 800 assets, but it's a big group of people.

There is some evidence, btw, that these people were killed or purged rather than just agents provacateurs. Saddam got a hold of one of the satellite phones they were using for communication, so he was listening in on all the plans. But he had to have gotten the phone from someone...

[p.lukasiak]

There is some evidence, btw, that these people were killed or purged rather than just agents provacateurs.

of course --- I'd say most of the people who disappeared were part of the coup. My point was that the coup plot was thoroughly infiltrated by Saddam's spies, who used the coup plot as a means of weeding out anyone who was potentially disloyal. Saddam knew about the plans well before the date the coup was supposed to take place -- but he waited until the very last minute to act against the plotters.

[emptywheel]

p luk

But that still doesn't make sense wrt to decapitation (a word that probably makes more sense than regime change). The CIA was doing a lot of work to make this coup successful--and exposing people both within and outside of CIA. Are you suggesting that work was all a front? That Clinton didn't want to get rid of Saddam?

[Melanie]

What smokestack said. Remember that James Woolsey was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century and that the PNAC'ers riddled the policy establishment from Bush 1 through the Clinton years.

[p.lukasiak]

But that still doesn't make sense wrt to decapitation (a word that probably makes more sense than regime change). The CIA was doing a lot of work to make this coup successful--and exposing people both within and outside of CIA. Are you suggesting that work was all a front? That Clinton didn't want to get rid of Saddam?

I challenge the assertion that the CIA did a lot of work to make the coup successful -- the CIA was doing a lot of "work", but was it really directed toward ensuring the success of the coup, or was it just the usual kind of intelligence stuff the CIA is always doing? (i.e. you seem to be implying that the reason the CIA put so much effort into spying on Iraq was to facilitate the coup....I seriously doubt that was the motivation.)

As for Clinton's role in the coup -- one of the elements that is missing is evidence that the US military was poised to help the coup. The US did try to trigger a "crisis" in the inspections that would justify "decapitation", but did so in a manner that precluded co-ordination with the coup plotters (i.e. the "crisis" was that UN inspectors were sitting in a parking lot being denied access to a site it wanted to inspect. The US couldn't bomb Iraq with those inspectors as potential hostages --- in other words, the "crisis" that was created was incompatible with the planning for the coup, which supposedly involved the US killing Saddam and destroying key Republican Guard units through bombing, clearing the way for the coup plotters to take over.)

Basically, I think Clinton was not opposed to a coup, but wasn't willing to take the considerable risks involved in actively supporting it. There was certainly support within the CIA for the coup, but the enthusiasm of these CIA operatives for a coup was not shared throughout the administration.

The bottom line is that if Clinton wanted Saddam dead, he had ample opportunities (or excuses) to "decapitate" the regime -- and didn't do so.

(One aspect of my "paranoid theory" that I should mention is that I personally don't buy the "we didn't have any sources in Iraq" meme -- what we didn't have were sources who had the details on Saddam's WMD programs and where he was hiding everything, which was the only kind of source we considered valuable because we didn't want the truth, we only wanted information that conformed to our need to "contain" Iraq. We probably had plenty of sources in Iraq with the "wrong" information -- that they had no knowledge of WMDs. But these would not have been considered "good" sources.)