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Declassified CIA Report Undercuts Bush's Desire to Invade Iraq
by Ivan Eland, The Cato Institute
October 14, 2002

Ivan Eland is director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, and author of the book, "Putting 'Defense' Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World."

The CIA's newly declassified judgments on the likelihood of Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction severely undercut the Bush administration's case for attacking Iraq. The CIA noted that Iraq now appears to be deterred from initiating terrorist attacks against the United States with conventional, biological or chemical weapons. But if the United States invades Iraq and attempts to depose Hussein, the CIA concluded that he would be more likely to conduct such attacks.

According to the CIA's analysis, Hussein might decide that the extreme action of helping radical Islamist terrorists in carrying out a biological or chemical attack on the United States would be his last chance to get revenge by taking a large number of American victims with him. The CIA's assessment confirms what opponents of a U.S. invasion of Iraq have been arguing in public all along.

The uncovering of such analysis shows that the policy of deterring and containing Iraq does work and that a more aggressive policy of invasion could prove disastrous. The U.S. government's national security policy is supposed to enhance the security of the nation, not reduce it. Risking terrorist attacks against the United States with conventional, biological, or chemical weapons merely to remove a thug who has been successfully deterred and contained for more than a decade defies common sense.

posted by A Curmudgeon 6:14 AM