The Two Strategic Gambles
As readers of a certain age will recall, by the late 1950s the Soviet Union was locked in a strategic arms competition with the United States, and it was loosing badly. America enjoyed a considerable and growing advantage in both long- and intermediate-range nuclear forces. Yet, having embarked on an ambitious foreign policy designed to test American resolve, and possibly drive U.S. forces out of Berlin, Khrushchev was not prepared to curtail his aspirations. To enhance his military capabilities vis-?-vis the U.S., he could have deployed a number of costly, inaccurate and vulnerable first generation ICBMs. Alternatively, he could invest the USSR's large, but not unlimited, resources in the development of more advanced missiles (with deployment many years in the future) and other, more reliable, strategic weapons systems that might actually move the nuclear balance in his favor. Sensibly enough, he chose the latter course. However, to maintain the highest quality "deterrence" against the West and, even more to the point, to support the enhanced Soviet prestige necessary for an ambitious foreign policy, Khrushchev also engaged in an elaborate deception designed to make the West believe that Moscow had already fielded strategically meaningful numbers of advanced ICBMs. The Soviet leader's public statements were supported by a carefully tailored intelligence disinformation campaign.
From Khrushchev's perspective, the entire plan worked like a charm. The alleged "missile gap" between the United States and the USSR was seized upon by a young Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, to discredit the Eisenhower Administration and to defeat then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential election. Not only did the Soviet Union save billions of rubles, but Khrushchev now believed he could best the inexperienced Kennedy.
In the end, however, he had been too clever by half. The deception was discovered through the use of U-2 surveillance flights and confirmed by intelligence provided by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. When Khrushchev proceeded to place short and medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, in order to cover his blunder, Kennedy bested him. Backing down from a confrontation the Soviet Union could not win, the humiliated Khrushchev was "retired" within two years.
Although the details of Saddam's WMD deception were different, his basic strategic bluff was virtually identical to Khrushchev's gambit. Having concluded, in the aftermath of Desert Storm, that the possession of a WMD arsenal was an indispensable guarantee of his regime's survival, but not wanting to repudiate openly ? in the manner of Kim Jong-Il ? his international obligations, Saddam chose to continue to perfect his WMD systems, with a particular emphasis on the development of a nuclear capability, while actually drawing down the number of deployed WMDs. In many respects, this elaborate deception, about the existence of his deployed WMDs, was easier than Khrushchev's, since no amount of intelligence gathering or U.N. inspections could prove the negative. Thus, the world was left with the impression that Saddam had WMD capabilities, but there was no "smoking gun." Certainly, there was nothing that could produce an "Adlai Stevenson moment" (when President Kennedy's U.N. ambassador was able, using U-2 generated photographs, actually to show Soviet missile sites in Cuba ).
A Just-in-Time Arsenal
Yet, the existence of this state of affairs in 2003 does not, contrary to the claims of the administration's critics, validate the wisdom of the U.N. sanctions/inspections strategy or demonstrate that the U.S.-preferred regime change strategy was unnecessary and unwise. To begin with, a "virtual" WMD strategy enabled Saddam to wait out the sanctions/inspections regime, which, by the late 1990s, was already beginning to break down ? with claims (by France among others) that the innocent Iraqi people were suffering more than the guilty Saddam regime. It should be recalled that the administration's pre-September 11, 2001 efforts to bolster and "smarten" anti-Saddam sanctions were met with strong opposition from Russia, China and France, all of which were arguing that Iraq should be allowed to rejoin the international community as a normal sovereign state. There were no indications that those who have been critical of "regime change" as the most effective means for dealing with the threat posed by Saddam would have had the bureaucratic and political staying power of sustaining for years, and even decades, a policy of de facto international trusteeship, enforced by weapons inspectors, to be imposed over Iraq (as well as on other WMD-aspiring, rogue regimes).
Moreover, to the extent that Saddam felt confident about his ability to control the timing of events (to be the initiator, rather than the victim, of any renewed military operations), thereby being able to reconstitute his arsenal when needed, retaining a small WMD stockpile was not an optimal strategic choice for Iraq. It did not provide a substantial enough war-fighting capability, yet posed an ever-present risk of detection ? it would have been difficult, for example, to conceal an accident akin to the one that took place in Chelyabinsk in the Urals in 1979, when an accidental release of anthrax killed scores of people (and confirmed the existence of the Soviet bio-weapons program despite the Kremlin's denials).
Significantly, this "just-in-time" approach to WMD deployment was no less dangerous, from the U.S. perspective, than possession of a WMD stockpile. At least with respect to chemical and biological agents, the most important assets appear to be the availability of suitable expertise and the necessary industrial base. Both of these Saddam had in plenty. Thus, a rogue state, capable of reconstituting its WMD arsenal at a time of its own choosing, poses as much of a threat as a regime with the WMD forces in being.
Finally, an Iraqi just-in-time strategy may have been even more dangerous to the United States because of the possibility that Saddam would share either existing WMD, or technical expertise, with a terrorist group. In fact, a rogue regime which has adopted a virtual arsenal approach, while disclaiming its intent to field WMDs, might well feel that it has more plausible deniability and, therefore, would actually be more likely to transfer WMDs to a third party. There is even a possibility that Iraq may have combined its WMD-related efforts with other rogue regimes (Syria in particular) and intended to develop a "distributed" arsenal, which would have been more difficult to both detect and target.
The Myth of Perfect Intelligence
The administration's critics have also embraced the dangerous and ahistorical notion that it is possible to develop and maintain a perfectly accurate intelligence picture of what is being done by a dangerous foe. While the CIA cannot be fully exonerated ? its failure to recruit and run human intelligence sources within Iraq is particularly damning ? developing consistently reliable body of intelligence, especially when dealing with a ruthless dictatorial regime, is an inherently challenging undertaking. Notably, many times in the past, the CIA's "group think" mentality, mentioned prominently in the Senate report, has not caused it to overestimate the threat. If anything, more often than not, the CIA has underestimated the extent of the threats facing the U.S. This was certainly the case with its assessments of the Soviet nuclear build-up, Soviet expense expenditures, and many other aspects of Soviet foreign and defense policies. The CIA's estimates of Iraq's nuclear programs on the eve of the 1991 Gulf war were also way off. Meanwhile, the September 11 Commission is about to indict the CIA and the entire U.S. intelligence community for its failure to anticipate and predict the September 11 attacks.
While gauging accurately what is being done by a regime that is trying to hide its weapons programs, as was the case with North Korea, is difficult, doing this vis-?-vis a regime that has engaged in a deliberate strategic deception program is virtually impossible. Yet, this was precisely the case with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. For example, even if the CIA succeeded in penetrating the senior echelons of Saddam's regime, and all of its human sources reported that no WMD stockpiles were in place, this evidence, even if one assumes that the sources involved were totally reliable, still would not have been conclusive.
After all, it is always possible that Iraq's program was sufficiently compartmentalized to ensure that even senior regime members did not have an accurate picture of what was going on. In fact, this compartmentalization is quite typical of dictatorial and secrecy-obsessed regimes. In the Soviet case, for example, the whole nuclear weapons program was entrusted by Stalin to his secret police chief, Beria, and its specifics were not known for many years by most of the senior Soviet political and military leaders. All of this means that the availability of perfect intelligence is a myth, and the search for it is inherently self-defeating. Unfortunately, U.S. decision-makers often have to make tough choices on the basis of imperfect and ambiguous intelligence.
A Reasonable Policy
When the totality of this evidence is fairly considered, the administration's overall assessment of the threat posed by Iraq 's WMD program remains fully justified. Significantly, Iraq's failure to avail itself of the one last chance to disarm, offered by Resolution 1441, coming as it did on the heels of ten years of sanctions and 16 successive Security Council resolutions, properly convinced the administration that Saddam would never give up his WMD program, no matter what economic and diplomatic pressure was brought to bear upon him. Therefore, the policy choice to effect a "regime change" was both consistent with the administration's reasonable prospective assessments of Saddam's WMD program and constituted the only effective way of dealing with this threat.
When dealing with authoritarian anti-American states with a demonstrated history of WMD ambitions, the only safe way, short of regime change, to ensure that they are irreversibly disarmed is to adopt a wide-range of confidence-building measures, which go way beyond the traditional inspection regime. Under this scenario, the burden of persuasion is really on the regime itself. In this regard, as was persuasively argued by the president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, experience amassed during the "de-nuclearization" of such countries as South Africa and Ukraine demonstrates that a prerequisite to a successful nuclear disarmament is a willing host regime that is prepared to give the international community unrestricted access to its facilities and weapons installations and adopt a wide-range of confidence building measures. Indeed, Libya's recent overture to the international community is another excellent example of this confidence-building approach.
By contrast, a rogue regime that is playing a shell game with inspectors can never be disarmed with any degree of confidence. Significantly, this concern was well recognized by the U.N. weapons inspectors; neither Hans Blix, nor any of his predecessors, have ever claimed that they were confident of their ability to disarm Iraq fully of its WMDs. What the administration's critics are really saying is that, despite the September 11 experience, they would not use force in a situation in which strong, albeit not full-proof, arguments can be made that there is a grave and rising danger to the U.S. In a world in which perfect intelligence is but a pipe dream, this approach virtually guarantees inaction. Come November, the American people should decide whether this is the best way to protect our security in the 21st century.
David B. Rivkin Jr. & Lee A. Casey are partners in the Washington , D.C. , office of Baker & Hostetler LLP. Both of them served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and Bush Sr., administrations. This essay draws on some of their previous work, which has appeared in the Wall Street Journal Europe and In The National Interest.
