Iraq 2002–2003: how the case for war was made

Series: How minds are moved · The record: documented campaigns · 4 of 7

On 5 February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the UN Security Council for more than an hour. He showed satellite photographs, played intercepted conversations, held up a small vial to show how little anthrax could kill thousands, and presented drawings of mobile biological weapons laboratories on trucks. Six weeks later the invasion of Iraq began. In 2004 the US government’s own Iraq Survey Group reported that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and had not restarted a nuclear programme. The drawings of the trucks had come, almost entirely, from one man that German intelligence code-named “Curveball”, whom they had warned they could not verify.

The chapter on Iraq in the book I am writing, SHTF vs STFU, is called “The Price Is Worth It”. It follows the country from 1988 to 2014. This post focuses on one narrow question, the one the official inquiries in both Washington and London set out to answer: how was the case for war made, and what did the record later show?

Contents · 10 sections

TL;DR #

• The case rested on a few strands of intelligence, each weaker than presented: Curveball’s mobile labs, the aluminium tubes, the Niger uranium documents, and claims from exile groups.
• Dissent existed inside the governments at the time, and was mostly invisible to the public.
• A July 2002 British record, the “Downing Street memo”, said that in Washington “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”.
• The US Senate Intelligence Committee (2004, 2008) and the UK Chilcot Inquiry (2016) found the claims overstated and the certainty unjustified.
• Saddam Hussein’s own regime also cultivated ambiguity about its weapons, which made the case easier to make.

The strands of the case #

Curveball. An Iraqi chemical engineer who sought asylum in Germany in 1999 told German intelligence he had worked on mobile biological weapons labs. The Germans did not let the Americans interview him and said they could not verify his claims. His reporting nevertheless flowed into more than a hundred US intelligence products and into President Bush’s State of the Union address and Powell’s UN speech. After the invasion, no such labs were found; the trailers found were most likely for producing hydrogen for weather balloons. In February 2011 the man, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, told The Guardian that he had made the story up, and that he was proud it had helped remove Saddam.

The aluminium tubes. In 2001 Iraq tried to buy some 60,000 high-strength aluminium tubes. The CIA argued they were meant for centrifuges to enrich uranium. The US Department of Energy’s experts, the people who actually knew centrifuges, assessed that they were probably for artillery rockets, and the State Department’s intelligence bureau formally dissented. On 8 September 2002 the New York Times front page reported the tubes as evidence of a nuclear programme; the same morning, the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told CNN that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”. The dissent was in a footnote of a classified estimate. The mushroom cloud was on television.

Niger uranium. The claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger rested partly on documents that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s head, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the Security Council in March 2003 were “not authentic”. They were crude forgeries.

The exiles. The Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi, supplied defectors and stories to officials and journalists for years. Many of their claims turned out to be misleading or invented. In February 2004 Chalabi told the Daily Telegraph: “We are heroes in error.”

The British dossier. In September 2002 the UK government published a dossier that included the claim that some Iraqi weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes of an order. The claim came from a single, second-hand source and referred to battlefield munitions, a caveat the public framing did not carry.

The memo #

On 23 July 2002, eight months before the war, Tony Blair met his senior ministers and advisers. A foreign-policy aide, Matthew Rycroft, wrote the minutes. The head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service, reporting on his talks in Washington, was recorded as saying that military action was now seen as inevitable, that President Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by “the conjunction of terrorism and WMD”, and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was recorded as saying the case was “thin”.

The memo was published by the Sunday Times on 1 May 2005. Its significance is disputed: defenders of the war said “fixed” meant “arranged” in British usage and that it added nothing new; critics saw it as proof the decision came before the evidence. Read the text and decide.

What the inquiries found #

The US Senate Intelligence Committee, July 2004. Its first conclusion was that most of the major key judgements in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting”. It criticised the CIA on the tubes and on Curveball. The committee was bipartisan.

The same committee, June 2008. A later report on the administration’s public statements found that some claims, particularly about an operational partnership between Iraq and al-Qaeda, were not supported by the intelligence. Its Democratic chairman, Jay Rockefeller, said the administration had “repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent”. Several Republican members dissented, arguing that the statements were generally backed by the intelligence of the time. Both views are on the record.

The Chilcot Inquiry, July 2016. After seven years and some 2.6 million words, the UK inquiry found that Britain joined the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted, that judgements about Iraq’s weapons were “presented with a certainty that was not justified”, and that planning for the aftermath was “wholly inadequate”. The report did not conclude that Blair deliberately lied; in a 2017 BBC interview Chilcot said Blair had not been “straight with the nation” about his decision-making. Blair accepted responsibility for the decision and rejected any charge of deceit.

The other side of the deception #

It would be incomplete to tell this as a story of one side only. Saddam Hussein’s regime had used chemical weapons against Iran and against Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988; that history made the claims plausible. After 1991 the regime obstructed inspectors for years. The Iraq Survey Group and the FBI agent who interviewed Saddam after his capture reported that he had deliberately kept the world uncertain about his weapons, largely to deter Iran. A regime that bluffs about weapons it no longer has makes it easier for others to overstate them. Two deceptions met in the middle.

What it felt like from the inside #

In late 2002, if you watched the news in America or Britain, the weapons felt like common knowledge. Powell, the most trusted figure in the administration, said so. Serious newspapers said so. The question on television was not “does Iraq have weapons?” but “how soon will he use them?”. Disagreeing felt like denying the obvious. At the same time, millions of people marched against the war on 15 February 2003, so the feeling was not universal. The dissenters inside the agencies, at the Department of Energy and in the State Department’s intelligence bureau, were invisible.

What it could and could not do #

The persuasion worked in the short run: Congress authorised force in October 2002, the British Parliament voted for war in March 2003, and public support in the US was high when the invasion began. It did not survive contact with the facts. When no weapons were found, trust in intelligence agencies, governments and the press that had repeated them fell sharply, and that distrust is still used today, sometimes fairly, sometimes to dismiss true intelligence.

How to notice it #

• One source behind many headlines. Ask how many independent sources a key claim actually has. Curveball was one man.
• Experts who disagree, in a footnote. Look for the dissent; it usually exists and is usually buried.
• A deadline that does not come from the facts. “We cannot wait for the smoking gun” is an argument for skipping verification.
• Fear images. A mushroom cloud, 45 minutes. Vivid numbers and images that stick are designed to stick.
• Exile groups and defectors with a stake. They may be right; they also want something.
• The decision before the evidence. If the policy is fixed and the case is being assembled, the case will look stronger than it is.

Frequently asked questions #

Did the US and UK governments lie about Iraq’s weapons? #

The official inquiries found overstatement, unjustified certainty and ignored dissent. Neither the Chilcot report nor the Senate committee concluded that leaders knowingly lied about the weapons. In 2017 Chilcot himself said Blair had not been “straight with the nation” about his decision-making, and Blair rejects any charge of deceit. Where overstatement ends and deception begins remains a matter of judgement.

Did Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction in 2003? #

The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles and no active nuclear programme. Small numbers of old, degraded chemical munitions from before 1991 were found later; they were not the programmes the case for war described.

Was the press fooled or complicit? #

Both views are argued. The New York Times published an editor’s note in May 2004 acknowledging that some of its coverage had relied too heavily on sources with an interest in regime change.

Why did Saddam not prove he had nothing? #

Investigators reported he wanted Iran and internal rivals to believe he might still have weapons. He tried to show inspectors enough to avoid war and keep enough doubt to deter enemies, and failed at both.

The lesson #

The case for the Iraq war was not built from a single big lie. It was built from weak pieces of intelligence, each presented with more certainty than it carried, while the people who doubted them were kept out of view. The two governments’ own inquiries later said so in writing. The practical lesson is to ask, of any claim that leads to war: how many independent sources, who disagreed, and what would it take to change the decision? If the honest answer to the last question is “nothing”, the evidence is decoration.