Francis Fukuyama offers best explanation so far of WMD absence

Noted political economist Francis Fukuyama provides a compelling case at OpinionJournal.com. He argues that in an effort to avoid an intelligence lapse, the intelligence community produced a false positive. Given the surprise at the extent of the WMD programs found after the First Gulf War, inspectors and intelligence analysts were convinced that there was in Iraq a will to produce WMD's. In a closed society it is diffiuclt to percieve what is really going on, so there was a question about what was really going on there. They proceeded from an assumption of "better safe than sorry", a reasonable proposition. What happened over the past decade is that this assumption became mistaken for a truth. There are two reasons for this. One is that any assumption acted upon for a long period of time, especially by a succession of individuals will tend to harden into a presumption. Second, Saddam Hussein acted like he had WMD's and wanted more. Fukuyama provides a good argument that a lot of internal lying in Iraq took place as scientists and bureaucrats avoided telling the dictator and his two mad sons that they could not get what they wanted. Also, it makes sense for Saddam to pretend to have more in his hand than he did, even while denying there was anything there at all.

Fukuyama goes on to argue that the media fixation with the supposed "lie" about the Iraqi WMD's is misplaced. The President followed the intelligence estimates as well as the assumptions of his predecessor. Clinton's defence of Bush on the Larry King show on the matter of the 16 words reinforces this. The real problem, Fukuyama argues, is the intelligence failure. How could we have been so wrong about these matters?

This raises an interesting question, addressed excellently in the book Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch. They argue that there are failures to learn, to anticipate, and to adapt and that are the cause of institutional failure. Fukuyama claims, "The failure is not one of dishonest politicians and officials, but of a broader institutional process involving multiple intelligence agencies and the U.N." This kind of analysis is exactly what Cohen and Gooch provide. There was clearly a failure to learn, in this case learning what was real and what was presumed. Assumptions need to be tested rigorously, not adopted blindly. There was plenty of evidence about the nature of things and yes the wrong conclusions were drawn. Second there was a failure to anticipate that this could be a ruse to make Saddam look stronger than he was, or to anticipate that the Iraqi regime was so disfunctional as to be able to decieve itself, perhaps completely. This produces, according the Cohen and Gooch, aggregate failure. The failures described in Military Misfortune lead to great military defeats, not great military successes as happened in Iraq, but the instituions in question here is not the military, but the intelligence community.

That said, there remains no doubt that the regime in Iraq wanted WMD's and so the international community could never have turned away from its rigorous containment of Iraq, and rigorous containment was becoming politically less viable as countries like France and Russia wanted to do business in Iraq. That terrorism is the product of tyranny and failure in the Arab world and that reform had to be imposed on a significant part of the region to tip the scales in favor of general reform and liberalization. The status quo was going to produce the status quo. In a war on terrorism, the heart of terrorism, dysfunctional muslim states, had to be, and still need to be compeled to change. In a happy world, the mere example of Iraq would be sufficient to complete this process of reform in the Arab and broader muslim world. See Thomas Friedman's column today for good news in that direction. Most probabaly more will have to be done. One hopes that this "more" will be something less than more fighting, that it will be limited to persuasion, pressure, and support for the right ideas. As I wrote last week, we need to employ the assumption that we might have to fight again, because we are better safe than sorry. This time, let's remember that that is an assumption and that further war is not inevitable to see reform in the muslim world. The war was neccesary. What emerges as a cruel irony is that it was probabaly not possible without the UN's own assumptions that WMD's and WMD programs still existed in Iraq. This speaks, I think, to the dysfunction of that organization. See this post from the same day last week.