Exaggerating The Threats

Newsweek - Fareed Zakaria -- Iraq is part of a pattern. Saddam was assumed to be working on a vast weapons program to the end because he was an evil man

But it is also clear that the United States government overstated the threat posed by Iraq. It exaggerated what it knew and made definitive statements where the intelligence was murky. Richard Butler, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector during the late 1990s and a supporter of the war, wrote last week in The Australian, “Clearly a decision had been taken to pump up the case against Iraq.”

This should not surprise us. For decades some conservatives, including many who now wield great influence, have had a tendency to vastly exaggerate the threat posed by tyrannical regimes.

In 1989, the CIA published an internal review of its threat assessments from 1974 to 1986 and came to the conclusion that every year it had “substantially overestimated” the Soviet threat along all dimensions.

During the early 1970s, hard-line conservatives pilloried the CIA for being soft on the Soviets. As a result, CIA Director George Bush agreed to allow a team of outside experts to look at the intelligence and come to their own conclusions. Team B—which included Paul Wolfowitz—produced a scathing report, claiming that the Soviet threat had been badly underestimated. In retrospect, Team B’s conclusions were wildly off the mark.

In the 1990s, some of these same conservatives decided that China was the new enemy. The only problem was that China was still a Third World country and could hardly be seen as a grave threat to the United States. What followed was wild speculation about the size of the Chinese military and accusations that it had engaged in massive theft of American nuclear secrets. This came to a crescendo with the publication of the Cox Commission Report in 1999, which claimed that Chinese military spending was twice what the CIA estimated. The Cox report is replete with speculation, loose assumptions and errors of fact. The book it footnotes for its military-spending numbers, for example, does not say what the report claims.

What we discovered about the Soviet Union after the cold war was that it was every bit as evil as we had thought—indeed more so—but that it was a whole lot less powerful than we had feared. That is what we will probably discover about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.