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David Kay
Former Head, Iraq Survey Group (ISG)
Answers to Questions from the Audience
Q: Was there any fundamental difference between your conclusions on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and conclusions by Hans Blix, David Albright and Mohamed ElBaradei?
A: Since Bill Clinton is in town, I probably should take the defensive. It depends on what you mean by fundamental. There were significant differences. Let me describe it in the positive sense. Iraq was clearly, in my view (and I think we produced the evidence), in violation of UN Resolution 1441. There were activities it carried out that were prohibited, that they did not report to UN inspectors. There were activities and equipment that they kept away from the inspectors. With the regard to the conclusion - and maybe this is what the questioner means by fundamental - did Iraq have, at the time of the war, large stockpiles of chemical/biological agents or a nuclear program at the advanced stage? I think no. Dr. Blix and I are in agreement on that.
Q: Do you believe weapons inspectors were a vital source of information to the British and the U.S.? Was the same intelligence provided to the UN?
A: This refers to 1991-1998, when inspectors were on the ground. I was in China when the Gulf War broke out, doing a course for the Chinese government on evaluation in the nuclear power industry, because they had just laid two layers of concrete without any rebar, and the workers didn't tell them about that until they were into the third layer. That was an expensive lesson. I finished that up and thought I deserved something, so I went off by myself to Telluride to go skiing. I had not a clue when the war ended that I was going to be involved. I got back to Vienna, Austria, and discovered (the lack of post-war planning is not unique to this administration; maybe it's unique to the Bush family, but it's not unique to this administration) that no one had thought about what do we do with Iraq: We're not going to Baghdad; Iraq had chemical/biological missiles - what do we do? In a 24-hour period they wrote a resolution that said the UN should go in. It's the best marching orders I ever had. We were to "destroy, remove or render harmless" - I mean for every Texas kid, that should have been on my playpen. As my parents will tell you, I spent at least 12 years doing that. At least in the nuke area, we had been conducting periodic inspections of Iraq, so that we knew a little bit about it. But Iraq, as everyone needs to be reminded, is a huge country, the size of California; Baghdad is the size of LA. We needed technical intelligence and any other intelligence anyone had. We put out a request to all UN governments. Initially, the only two to respond were the U.S. and UK. Later, some others came in. We took this information - and if you haven't worked with intelligence information, let me tell you, it's almost all ambiguous, or as a friend of mine likes to say, "Half of it's right, half of it's wrong; we just can't tell you which half is which." You would get information, go out on the ground, seek to examine it and sometimes it would pan out and sometimes not. You'd convey that information back to the people who provided you the intelligence so that the next go-around they could improve what they tell you. It's a cycle. And if you don't do that every time, you're going out with someone who hasn't improved their access. So there was a constant interchange. Was it supplied to the UN? Not broadly. Remember, Iraq was a member of the UN. You provided the people who provided you the intelligence a feedback loop; it was done, it was vital. One reason we got to where we were in 2003 is because, when you lost on-site inspection in 1998, you had to fall back on satellite photography - which still doesn't do anything for you if you're inside a building - or defectors - who told us the stories they thought we wanted to hear and we were dumb enough to want to hear them.
Q: Do you think the UN should have the lead role in ongoing weapons monitoring, or should it be the U.S., or some other party? Does it depend on which country is involved - Iraq versus other rogue regimes?
A: With regard to Iraq: the U.S. has had the lead responsibility since the war; it's absolutely essential to multilateralize this and transfer this back to other organizations. In the biological weapons area there is not a UN organization that can take that up, and we need to create or to expand the capabilities of an existing one to do it. The responsibility for the continued monitoring in Iraq - Iraq is going to require continuing monitoring. They have the secrets. They know how to do it. So the world and the region has an interest in that - it has got to be international - it cannot be the U.S. There are circumstances in which it doesn't have to be the UN. The best example I can think of was the arrangement between Brazil and Argentina. When they both decided to back away from their nuclear program, they both had problems with the nonproliferation regime, and for the initial period they decided that they would conduct the inspections of each other. That's suitable. I don't think there's a reason to hang up on ideology or religion to say it's always got to be the UN, but it is usually better if it's not a single state.
Q: Even with your call for an overhaul of the intelligence services, do you think your report or any other report justified the U.S. deciding on a preemptive strike in Iraq?
A: Was there justification for a preemptive strike? It's hard to answer, and it's a question I ask myself almost every day, because the equation changes almost every day. Today we are up to 853 Americans lost since the war began, and you can't face that without asking yourself, Was it worth it? Saddam was a threat to his neighbors, a threat to the region. I think Saddam, on his own, wouldn't have changed. Saddam and Iraq was actually a more dangerous place than we recognized; it had become a criminal society where everyone and everything was for sale. In a market - and we do have a market out there - in which terrorists and others are trying to obtain weapons technology - chemical, biological and nuclear weapons - eventually a willing buyer and a willing seller would have come together in Iraq, and we probably wouldn't have known about it until after the fact.
There is another sense, and this is hardest to convey. I had often to go out to Hilla, where the first mass grave was found. You go out there last year, roughly at this time of the year and in July, temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and you see Iraqi families digging with their hands, without any implements, trying to find a piece of cloth, an identity paper, something that would tell them their son, their daughter, their husband, their wife, had been killed by Saddam. My concern is that ten years from now we'll have going through Cal Berkeley a very smart Iraqi political scientist who will write his dissertation, which will essentially say: The Americans and the West only cared about us when we could kill Iranians (which they were in favor of) or about our oil. They didn't care about us when Saddam was destroying our country and our society. There is an element of truth to that, and we've got to come to terms with it.
We did a tremendous good in ridding the world of Saddam and his sons; it was an evil regime that makes the heart of darkness an inadequate metaphor for it. As we calculate the cost ourselves, and not the benefits for the Iraqis - and let me say that's a wrong calculation, although I understand why we do it - certainly as the number of casualties has gone up, as Iraq has become, and I think it has, an attractive area for jihadists to mobilize against the United States, we have to recognize that cost is going up, too. It's not an easy question, but it's a very important question to come to terms with.
Q: Comment on whether you believe, or whether there's any evidence, some of these weapons went to Syria or Lebanon. Are some Iraqi weapons now in the hands of terrorists?
A: You have to separate two kinds of weapons. The Iraqis, we all know, produced large numbers of chemical and a smaller but still large number of biological weapons in the 1980s in conjunction with the Iran-Iraq War. They were supposed to destroy them, they were supposed to let the UN destroy them; they destroyed a number themselves. Did some survive? Absolutely. About a dozen have been discovered in Iraq in onesies and twosies. The end of a war is never nice - the end of two wars. Did some get lost in the process? Were some hidden? Absolutely. But the real meaningful question relates to: How about the weapons that we thought were there? Did they go someplace else, and is that the reason why we're not finding them? They could have gone to Syria or they could have gone to Lebanon.
There are photographs of trucks going to Syria before the war. But the Syrian government was not willing to allow the Iraq Survey Group to go traipsing through Syria, and they were saying there is nothing there. To go to the source, which is what you'd like to do, you couldn't. So we did the next thing: If weapons had gone to Syria, they had to be produced. If weapons were produced, they required at least three things: a productive enterprise, scientists and engineers to work on it, security people to guard and move them. We go out and we try to find those, and we used every legal technique that was available to us. I had - probably the only time in my life I'll have it - a $10 million revolving fund and a stack of green cards. You come tell me where the weapons are, where they were produced, your involvement in it, and you can move to San Francisco, and we'll set you up for life. One of the stories I quickly discovered in Iraq: a lot of people would fabricate, so you had to be careful (I have a stack of offers to sell me red mercury, which doesn't exist), and they wanted to move very large villages. They were all part of their immediate family. But they didn't exist; they didn't come forward. We searched the country for the large, productive enterprise that would have been required. We couldn't find it; it didn't exist, as far as I'm concerned. My conclusion is: Large weapons stockpiles didn't exist, so ipso facto they didn't move to Syria or Lebanon. And that's about the best you're going to do.
There will always be - and we're going to have to learn to live with it - unresolved ambiguity. We let looting take place from April 9 until the end of May. I first went to Iraq in May; the U.S. military did not begin street patrols in Baghdad until the last week in May. The place was torn apart. Will we ever be able to put that Humpty Dumpty back together again and say with 100 percent certainty, This didn't exist, this didn't move? No. We're going to have to live with that. I would say at my confidence level of 85 percent, it didn't exist, so therefore it didn't move.
Q: Do you believe the Middle East nuclear-proliferation situation could be ameliorated if the Israelis committed to a nuclear-free region?
A: In one sense, yes, if the precondition occurred. I do not think the Israelis will commit themselves more than verbally, absent a permanent, lasting peace settlement. Here again I sometimes get disturbed with people mixing up tactics and root causes. The nuclear weapons of Israel were created because of the security situation Israel thought it lived in. They later become a source of tension and of other states seeking weapons of mass destruction. But the Israelis will never voluntarily eliminate their nuclear program until there is a peace adjustment. If you got that peace adjustment, a nuclear freeze and nuclear-elimination program would be possible and almost certainly would be helpful. But to hang on the belief that if only Israel today would give up its nuclear weapons everything would hunky-dory and we'd all be singing "Kumbaya" in the Middle East is totally unrealistic and doesn't recognize the fundamental security dilemmas.
Q: Do you have a personal theory on why so many seemingly knowledgeable people, and intelligence agencies, thought Iraq possessed these weapons? Was there something going on in Iraq - in the way they behaved or postured themselves, that many people, including Mr. Chalabi, thought they had these weapons? What does it tell us about the future in thinking about states that might have nuclear weapons?
A: One of the most frequent questions asked is: If Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction, why did he act like he had weapons of mass destruction? Why was he willing to lose his regime? It's a very American sort of question. Saddam, as with most totalitarian dictators at the very end, become most fearful of their own people, and Saddam had reasons to be fearful of his own people. The Kurds and the Shias hated him; they tried to overthrow him and had suffered tremendously for it. He was afraid of another uprising. He had dealt certainly decisively with the Kurds with the use of chemical weapons in 1988 at Halabja - horrible - and he believed that the knowledge and belief he had those weapons was what actually kept the Kurds in check. The Kurds had a tremendous respect for the weapons of mass destruction they thought Saddam had.
The second group he feared most- and for good reason, it's true of almost every totalitarian dictator - was the military, the guys with guns. Saddam thought that if in fact he indicated he had complied with the UN and he had given up those weapons, that would be a sign of weakness and he'd be subject to a successful military coup. Saddam never gave up his intention of eventually acquiring military weapons. The best series of interrogation questions we have of Tariq Aziz, the vice president of Iraq, is that Saddam concocted the view in 2000 that as long as you didn't put a weapon of mass destruction on the end of a missile, he could build missiles of whatever range - it was only when they were actually mated with a warhead. He didn't give up his desire, so he continued to act like it. That made it a target where the belief was credible.
The second fact is: We had no human operatives of our own in Iraq after 1998. So we were vulnerable to people describing programs that turned out not to exist. The third reason is: The one thing that kept our Iraq policy together - and this cuts across administrations; it's as true of the Clinton administration as it is the Bush administration - the one thing that kept our policy together and kept allies supporting us during this period was the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There was a very high bar of disproof. If you believed he didn't have those weapons, you had to realize, first of all, if you were right, you were threatening fundamental American policy, the very glue that made Iraq policy stand together with allies. And you had to prove this negative, which is almost always in the intelligence world an impossible thing to prove. It was literally the perfect storm that created the possibility to get it wrong. Do we have to worry about it in other circumstances with other proliferators? Absolutely.
Q: Were you unfairly portrayed as being too loyal to President George W. Bush? As deflecting blame from the White House to the CIA?
A: You're always in difficulty when you ask people how you are portrayed, because you yourself don't really know how you're portrayed. I think the intelligence community did a disservice to both President Clinton and President Bush. And not just the American intelligence service. I've had the honor, horror - I'm not sure what the appropriate adjective is - of reading the intelligence reports of a large number of our allies and other states. Every one of them believed that Saddam had at least chemical and biological weapons. In fact, M. Villepin, at the time the French foreign minister, now interior minister, before the war, wrote a lead article on the front page of Le Monde which says Saddam certainly has chemical and biological weapons. He didn't agree with American policy, but he had no doubt that those weapons existed. I think it was a failure of the intelligence system, and unless you deal with that failure, you're going to be surprised again and you may not be so lucky as this time.
