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Notes -
One of the greatest questions of the Iraq War, and a question with significant implications for our understanding of the competence of the 'deep state', Pentagon and intelligence services in general, is this:
Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
As time has passed since 2003, the 'mainstream' antiwar narrative, in which every important person supposedly 'knew' there were no WMDs but advocated for invasion anyway, has been shown to be largely ridiculous. It is likely, as discussed by Jervis and others who have done the most research into the cause of the intelligence failures in Iraq, that a substantial proportion of the intelligence establishment, including senior officials at the CIA and MI6, considered it highly likely that Saddam was, at the least, in posession of extensive chemical weapon stocks. The long since retired head of MI6 at the time said just this year that he was convinced they were there:
They weren't united about what to do, hence certain Cheney actions, and they didn't have much proof, thus the Office of Special Plans and intense efforts to convince Powell etc to act, but even many of those who didn't advocate invasion believed it was likely that he had these weapons. Most crucially, as Jervis argues, they overfocused on Saddam's refusal to allow international weapons inspectors as almost a guarantee that he was hiding WMDs, because why else would he refuse them? (Saddam ultimately claimed, under interrogation in 2004, that he refused to allow them because he didn't want Iran to find out how 'degraded' his weapon stocks were.)
So why, after it became clear weeks - and certainly months - into the invasion that there were no WMDs, did the US 'deep state' (including the intelligence services, perhaps with Pentagon assistance and/or with WH approval) not fake them? This anti-conspiracy is critically important for a few reasons:
It would likely have been significantly easier to fake chemical and/or biological weapon stocks in Iraq than to commit many of the other conspiracies placed at the foot of Western Intelligence services or the 'deep state'. The US didn't destroy its own chemical weapon stocks until 2022, and anthrax would be a trivial process for a small, highly focused internal intelligence unit to acquire or manufacture. No 'Bush planned 9/11' tier conspiracy theory is required, this would have been a focused, limited program in the vein of countless mid-late 20th century US intelligence operations involving a small number of operatives. While the coalition alleged variably the existence of (official link) chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the nuclear allegations were extremely vague and largely amounted to the idea that Iraq 'might' have started such a program, or that Saddam had 'met with' nuclear scientists or tried to acquire nuclear material.
It was not, therefore, necessary to manufacture the presence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material, for which a longer, riskier and more complex supply chain would be necessary. The presence of moderate stocks of chemical weapons, plus some anthrax, would have been sufficient to make the pre-war claims largely accurate, or at least accurate enough to be respectable.
It's unlikely the international press would have trusted the denials of ex-Baathist officials or scientists around planted evidence, and in the event of requiring an eyewitness, only a few people would had to have been paid. Even if the fakes weren't universally believed, they would have sowed enough FUD that US motives for the war wouldn't have been thoroughly discredited. There was no need to 'prove' the full extent of the pre-war allegations, only to lend them broad credence. 'There were no WMDs in Iraq' served as a major argument used by people hostile to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations after 2003, led to major protests and enquiries, and soured the popular perception of those governments extensively.
The Iraq War led to a climate in which CIA regime change operations supported by boots-on-the-ground became substantially less easy to slip through the political process. Even if we assume that (a) the CIA was ambivalent about an invasion, thus the OSP and (b) that the CIA didn't particularly care to prop up the careers of neoconservative politicians who suffered if they didn't find WMDs, the number of US regime change ops, and the number of direct military interventions involving ground soldiers, have declined significantly since 2003, even relative to the 1990s. Military involvement was (beyond those existing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan) limited to Syria, Libya and some support for Yemen and Ukraine, civil involvement to Ukraine and a couple of others, and the Iraq War's intelligence failures have led to a political climate in which committing ground soldiers to foreign conflicts is extremely unpopular. The presence of WMDs would have made all this significantly easier. For example, the CIA's failed rebel training program in Syria was in part a consequence of the US' steadfast refusal under Obama and Trump to support their regime change operation with a substantial number of ground forces.
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What do you think?
I think that for once the CIA was being honest, or at least the various intelligence services involved. There's a large step from "We think he probably does have something" to "He definitely has weapons of mass destruction". It seems to have been the politicians who were pushing for "tell us that yes it's true so we can stand up in parliament and declare war".
So I think the push for war came from the politicians and certain parties within the intelligence services, who wanted something to back them up, and once they got the go-ahead for war and the subsequent invasion/liberation (delete as applicable) of Iraq, actually finding the weapons was no longer a priority. They could now move on to claims of removing a tyrant and nation building and so forth.
The 'sources' relied upon for intel seem to have been sketchy, to say the least, and this was probably embarrassing to the agencies involved. Going ahead with planting fake weapons would have meant a public (amongst themselves and their political masters) admission that they had been fooled, and left them open to rebuke by the governments involved that "But you told us there really were WMD, what do you mean there aren't any?". It would also have meant that, intentional or not, they would have been demonstrating that their bosses in the government were liars. More trouble than it was worth to start up fakery. If, on the other hand, the intelligence agencies had been the ones pushing, then I think it would have been worth their while to fake WMDs, but not when the push came from the other way round.
Take the Dodgy Dossier:
Not everybody was on board with the alleged intel even within the intelligence services, so I think this is why there was no united effort to fake up WMD. The Chilcot Report was scathing of pretty much everyone and everything involved, but stopped short of saying anyone was deliberately lying:
It's difficult enough to disagree with the minister about the rationale for war, it's even worse if afterwards you have to tell him "So the intel was all lies, you're a fool for believing it, and now you have to give us permission to create fake WMDs we can show to the press, even though this is likely to create a trail that can be discovered by any investigative journalists willing to put the work in, and if discovered will convince everyone that we're a bunch of incompetent lying fools".
This sounds ridiculous, but given politicians arguably paid the most substantial price for the Iraq-was-a-disaster narrative, it seems less likely they’d be the brake on that kind of scheme from Dearlove types.
By the way (as is hopefully obvious), I don’t believe any of this, I just think that as a logical exercise it suggests Western intelligence agencies are much less competent than most people on the political extremes often suggest.
There's always "If Minister Jones ignored your advice and rushed to war on fake or dubious intel, why should you dig him out of the hole later (by faking up WMDs)? Let him be scapegoated in public, and his successor - hopefully - will listen more closely to you".
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