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Probe israeli intelligence justify iraq war Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/368428.htmlhttp://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/spages/368428.html
Last Update: 04/12/2003 19:45
Sarid calls for inquiry into intelligence ahead of Iraq war
By Amnon Barzilai, Haaretz Correspondent , and Haaretz Service
Meretz MK Yossi Sarid on Thursday called for the
creation of a committee to probe the conduct of
Israeli intelligence ahead of the U.S.-led war in
Iraq.
Sarid was responding to a report published in Haaretz
on Thursday, which concluded that Israel was "a full
partner" of the American and British conception regarding
Iraq's non-conventional capabilities.
Sarid, who filed the request
with head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and
Defense Committee, Likud MK Yuval Steinitz,
said Thursday that the report proves that the
assessments made by Israeli intelligence were
exaggerated and caused damage to the country by
necessitating that Israel prepare for "threats
that did not exist."
According to the report from the Jaffee Center
for Strategic Studies, the demands inside the
U.S. and Britain for investigations into the
intelligence failure on the eve of the war in
Iraq "forgets there was a third senior partner
to the assessment [that Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction and the ability to
deliver them] - and that third partner was
Israel." The report was written by Brig. Gen.
(res.) Shlomo Brum, a former deputy commander
of the IDF Planning Branch.
"Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the
picture presented by U.S. and British
intelligence about Iraq's non-conventional
capabilities ... [and] the failures in the war
in Iraq point to inherent failures and
weaknesses of Israeli intelligence and decision
makers. Similar failures could take place in
the future if the issue is not fully
researched, and the proper conclusions
reached," says Brum's report.
He writes that the exaggerated assessments about
Iraq's capabilities damaged public trust in the
national assessors and decision makers. The
result was the public ignoring the instructions
it was given and a financial cost still not
fully calculated.
"Before the war the defense establishment did
not spare any cost to deal with non-existent
threats or threats with zero possibility of
actualization," he writes.
There was also damage to Israel's foreign
relations, he says. "Foreign intelligence
agencies could lose their faith in the
intelligence assessments Israel provides, and
foreign countries could suspect that Israel is
providing false information meant to convince
that foreign country to accept Israel's
political positions."
And the exaggerated pre-war assessments, he
says, could result "in a potential enemy
concluding that if Israel as so terrified by
such a marginal threat, it must have good
reasons to be so scared."
Before the war, Israeli intelligence had to
choose between the possibility that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction and continued to
develop them or the UN inspectors had indeed
managed to disarm Iraq of those weapons and
long-range missiles. "Israeli intelligence
adopted the first choice without ever showing
signs of any doubt."
He says that the reason was a "dogmatic concept.
The intelligence agencies were taken over by a
mono-dimensional view of Saddam that
fundamentally described him as the embodiment
of evil, a man in the grip of an obsession to
develop weapons of mass destruction to harm
Israel and others, without any other
considerations ... there was absolute
indifference to the complexity of
considerations that a leader like Saddam
Hussein must have." Brum writes there was
reason to believe that survival was Saddam's
main goal "and such an assessment should have
led to the conclusion that after 1991
developing weapons of mass destruction could
become threatening to his survival."
The lack of skepticism about the concept proves
there are inherent problems in the intelligence
assessment methodologies used before the war,
Brum writes, pointing to two key problems:
exaggerated intelligence concerns, the roots of
which are in the Yom Kippur War, and a lack of
professionalism.
As a result of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli
intelligence officials prefer to predict the
worst possible scenario, so if they are proven
right, they come out as heroes, and if they are
proven wrong, everyone is so relieved that they
forget the faulty assessment. The lack of
professionalism, says Brum is in the act that
Israel's national assessment was that it was
threatened by Iraqi missiles, while its working
assumption was that Iraq had very few long
range missiles and launchers.
Intelligence failed to assess correcting the
enemy's intentions, giving an exaggerated
weight to the assumption Baghdad would either
strike at Israel when faced with its own to
destruction or try to disrupt the American
plans by striking before the invasion. "Both
theses were based on the dogmatic concept ...
no effort was made to examine whether attacking
Israel would serve the interests of Saddam's
survival or not ... the concept painted all the
information with one color and prevented any
alternative interpretations of the
intelligence."
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