2001 - 38 days of reported US bombing under bush

January - 3 days of US bombing

January 24th
January 28th
January 29th

February - 4 days of US bombing

February 11th
February 12th
February 16th
February 22nd

March - 0 days of US bombing

April - 6 days of US bombing

April 6th
April 11th
April 16th
April 17th
April 28th
April 30th

May - 2 days of US bombing

May 18th
May 23rd

June - 6 days of US bombing

June 5th
June 6th
June 14th
June 19th
June 25th
June 26th

July - 2 days of US bombing

July 7th
July 17th

August - 6 days of US bombing

August 7th
August 10th
August 14th
August 17th
August 27th
August 31st

September - 5 days of US bombing

September 4th
September 10th
September 20th
September 21st
September 27th

October - 3 days of US bombing

October 2nd
October 3rd
October 15th

November - 2 days of US bombing

November 11th
November 27th

December - 0 days of US bombing

2002 - 66 days of reported US bombing, 44 since DSM

January - 4 days of US bombing

January 20th
January 21st
January 22nd
January 24th

February - 2 days of US bombing

February 6th
February 28th

March - 0 days of US bombing

April - 2 days of US bombing

April 16th
April 20th

May - 6 days of US bombing

May 1st
May 20th
May 23rd
May 25th
May 28th
May 31st

June - 4 days of US bombing

June 14th
June 20th
June 26th
June 28th

July - 6 days of US bombing

July 4th
July 13th
July 14th
July 19th
July 23rd (Downing Street Minutes - Meeting) July 28th

August - 8 days of US bombing

(Downing Street Minutes - "CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August. The two broad US options were: ...")

August 5th
August 14th
August 17th
August 20th
August 23rd
August 25th
August 27th
August 30th

September - 7 days of US bombing

September 5th
September 9th
(September 12th - Bush speech to U.N.)
September 15th
September 23rd
September 25th
September 29th

October - 7 days of US bombing

October 3rd
October 9th
October 10th
(October 11th - House and Senate approve Iraq War Resolution) October 15th
(October 16th - Bush signs Iraq War Resolution)
October 22nd
October 23rd
October 30th

November - 8 days of US bombing

November 6th
(November 8th - UN Security Council Resolution 1441)
November 15th
November 18th
November 20th
November 21st
November 22nd
November 23rd
November 28th

December - 13 days of US bombing

December 1st
December 2nd

December 4th
U.K. News 12/4 Report: Britain and US step up bombing in Iraq - Ministry of Defence reveals 300% rise in ordnance dropped over southern no-fly zone

December 10th
December 14th
December 15th
December 16th
December 18th

December 20th
U.K. News 12/20 Report: The Secret War: Iraq War already under way - Quote from article: "The American and British attack on Iraq has already begun. While the Blair government continues to claim in Parliament that "no final decision has been taken", Royal Air Force and US fighter bombers have secretly changed tactics and escalated their "patrols" over Iraq to an all-out assault on both military and civilian targets."

Washington Post 12/22 Report: Casualties of an 'Undeclared War': Civilians Killed and Injured as U.S. Airstrikes Escalate in Southern Iraq - Quotes from article: "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in August ordered his commanders to widen the target list to include more communications centers, command buildings and fiber-optic links." & "Through the first four months of the year, U.S. and British forces struck Iraqi sites in the northern and southern no-fly zones just six times, while in the past four months they have launched about four dozen air raids." & "Iraqi officials complain that U.S. and British aircraft violated their airspace for patrols 1,141 times between Nov. 9th and Dec. 6th"

December 26th
December 29th
December 30th
December 31st

2003 - 35 days of reported US bombing, 79 since DSM

January - 13 days of US bombing

January 1st
January 2nd
January 3rd
January 4th
January 7th
January 8th
January 10th
January 13th
January 17th
January 19th
January 25th
January 26th

January 28th
- Bush State of the Union. Some of the many untrue quotes: "The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people." & "U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Inspectors recently turned up 16 of them -- despite Iraq's recent declaration denying their existence." (The 16 were old, empty with Chemical traces found) & "Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as the scientists inspectors are supposed to interview." &"A future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all. If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent" January 31st

February - 14 days of US bombing

February 5th - Colin Powell speech to UN
February 10th
February 11th
February 12th
February 14th
February 15th
February 16th
February 18th
February 22nd

February 23rd
U.K. News 2/23 Report: US and Britain Pound Iraqi Defenses in Massive Escalation of Airstrikes - Quote from article: "Until last summer, coalition aircraft patrolling the "no-fly" zones over Iraq hit back only at missile or artillery batteries that opened fire on them, or loosed AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles at radar units "locking on" to them. But with an invasion looming, the number and type of targets attacked have increased sharply."

February 25th
February 26th
February 27th
February 28th

March - 8 days of US bombing

March 3rd U.K. News 3/3 Report: 'Undeclared War' Enters New Phase: Allies Bomb Key Iraqi Targets - Quote from article: "Targets hit in recent days include the Ababil-100, a Soviet-designed surface-to-air missile system adapted to hit targets on the ground, and the Astros 2 ground rocket launcher with a range of up to 56 miles. These would be used to defend Iraq in the event of an invasion or to attack allied troops stationed in Kuwait."

March 6th
March 7th
March 8th
March 9th
March 10th
March 11th
March 14th

Next bombing: Day 1 of US/British Invasion of Iraq

New York Times 7/19 Report: U.S. Attacked Iraqi Defenses Starting in 2002 - Quote from article: "The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government." & "One reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan, General Moseley said." & "Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved." & "From June 2002 until the beginning of the Iraq war, the allies flew 21,736 sorties over southern Iraq and attacked 349 targets, including the (fiber-optic repeater) cable stations." & "As full-scale war approached, the air war commanders had five goals. They wanted to neutralize the ability of the Iraqi government to command its forces; to establish control of the airspace over Iraq; to provide air support for Special Operations forces, as well as for the Army and Marine forces that would advance toward Baghdad; and to neutralize Iraq's force of surface-to-surface missiles and suspected caches of biological and chemical weapons."

Source: U.S. Bombing Watch. Visit their site, they have links to reports for every day of bombing mentioned here. Many of these reports show things the like number of sorties, number of targets, change in type of targets as the war approached, reports from Iraq about the number of civillians killed, etc.

Submitted by isbister on Sat, 2005-06-11 22:03. @ afterdowningstreet.org

British bombing raids were illegal, says Foreign Office

A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war "to put pressure on the regime" was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.

The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began "spikes of activity" designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.

The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was "not consistent with" UN law, despite American claims that it was.

[snip]

Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.

Ministry of Defence figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the "spikes" began in May 2002.

However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam's forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.

The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.

The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to "degrade" Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action. The war finally started in March 2003. Michael Smith

"Secret" Air Base for Iraq War started prior 9-11

by Duke1676 This is great investigative work, and further evidence that Bush and the neocons were planning pre-emptive military action long before September 11th, and no matter what WMD intelligence revealed--Chris

With a small ceremony on April 26, 2003, control of Prince Sultan Air Base was handed back to the government of Saudi Arabia. Since the mid-nineties it had been the premier US air base in the region and the nerve center for all air force operations in the Gulf. As the home of the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the base was the primary command and control facility responsible for orchestrating the air campaigns for both Operation Southern Watch in Iraq and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

The timing of the closing of PSAB seemed odd, coming just weeks after the official start of military actions in Iraq. It should have, at the very least, caused unwanted logistical problems for the Pentagon and regional commanders, but it didn't. A contingency plan had long been in the works, not only for Prince Sultan Air Base, but also for the entire map of the Middle East, including Iraq.

Long before the US pullout, a new home for the operations had secretly been built in the deserts of Qatar. What had been in October 2001 "nothing more than a runway and a field of sand covered by two-dozen tents and a few warehouses", the Al Udeid Air Base was transformed in a few short months into one of the largest air bases in the world.

Published reports and official DOD statements claimed that the amazing transformation was the result of the heroic response of US servicemen to the tragedy of 9-11. A determined military had beaten indeterminate odds to transform a barren wasteland into a state of the art military base in order to "take the war to the terrorists".

The true story of the building of Al-Udeid is actually quite different. The planning for the mammoth base had in fact taken place long before Sept. 11, and actual work on the base began as early as the spring of 2001. The building of Al Udeid turns out not to be a "miracle in the desert" in response to a heinous attack, as touted by the military, but rather a required step on the path to regime change in Iraq.

It has long been accepted knowledge that the Bush Administration was working feverishly towards regime change in Iraq during the 18-month period between 9-11 and the official start of the war in March of 2003. The Downing St Minutes confirmed that the Administration was set on a path to war at least as early as mid-summer of 2002. The accounts of Paul O'Neil and Richard Clarke verified that Iraq was a front burner issue for the Administration from the very first day, and only intensified after the attacks. Yet finding hard evidence to prove that planning for the war in Iraq was taking place prior to 9-11 has been hard to find. A look at the building of Al Udied can provide that evidence. Diaries :: Duke1676's diary :: Tue Jun 21st, 2005 at 01:10:28 PM EDT

Excerpts from... The War Before The War

John Prados - June 24, 2005

John Prados is a senior fellow with the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. He is author of Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

The now-notorious Downing Street memos make it necessary to reframe the story of the aerial operations that took place before the war, with significant new conclusions emerging. It now appears that the United States, dragging a reluctant Great Britain behind it, executed a deliberate, purposeful bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq beginning in May 2002. Among the Downing Street memos are British government legal briefs written immediately before May 2002 finding that these air operations had no basis in international law and constituted aggressive acts.

In other words, Bush initiated hostilities a full 10 months before the Bush administration determined that all diplomatic means had been exhausted and six months before Congressional approval for the use of force.

From No-Fly To War Prep

The story begins with the No-Fly Zones imposed by the first Bush administration in the wake of the Gulf War of 1991. Those were intended to inhibit Saddam Hussein from using the remnants of his air force to suppress rebellions against him which broke out after his 1991 defeat. These zones were established over both northern and southern Iraq and enforced by U.S. and British aircraft flying from Turkey (for the north) and Saudi Arabia (for the southern zone). The latter operation, Operation Southern Watch, is the primary concern here.

Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, these No-Fly Zones were not established by the UN Security Council Resolutions that ended hostilities, nor by the Safwan ceasefire agreement reached directly by coalition forces and the Iraqi military command at the end of the war. Throughout the period from 1991 until 2002, these zones were maintained by means of constant U.S.-UK air patrols, with forces reacting by bombing or dog-fighting whenever the Iraqi air defenses actively opposed them.

Within weeks of taking office, the Bush administration signaled its toughness through a series of offensive air strikes against Iraq - but Operation Southern Watch then returned to business as usual. In fact the number of strikes against Iraqi ground targets in 2001 barely exceeded the previous year, and both years there were about half the number of strikes by Southern Watch aircraft as in 1999. All this changed in 2002. On January 24, 2002 allied aircraft struck an Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery site in southern Iraq. After that came a hiatus of three months.

Those three months involved very specific activity. In fact, Saudi Arabia, which did not support the U.S. adventure against Saddam, refused the use of its bases for anything more than the standard Southern Watch fighter patrols. In its search for operational flexibility the Bush administration shifted the locus of air operations to a base in Qatar that had to be developed on an emergency basis. Though the base at Al Uedid would not be complete until the fall, by May it had reached a condition permitting major aerial activity.

The War Begins

The air campaign, now re-branded Operation Southern Focus, assumed the character of a pre-invasion bombardment, under the leadership of Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, the CENTCOM air commander. Michael Gordon, writing in The New York Times on July 20, 2003, confirmed the nature of the campaign:

...Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government.

Indeed, one reason it was possible for the allies to begin the ground campaign to topple Mr. Hussein without preceding it with an extensive array of airstrikes was that 606 bombs had been dropped on 391 carefully selected targets under the plan, General Moseley said.

Half a dozen Southern Focus air strikes took place during May and June, almost all against the expanded targets of Iraqi air defense centers rather than individual sites. On June 30, President Bush signed orders for U.S. forces to marshal for the invasion and make final plans and preparations. In July the character of the air campaign suddenly changed. Sixty percent of the strikes now aimed at Iraqi communications systems.

The Downing Street memos document the discussion of Iraq strategy by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet on July 23, 2002. Britrish defense secretary Geoffrey Hoon told Blair at that meeting that the Americans had already begun "spikes" of air activity to put pressure on Saddam, perhaps provoking a casus belli. To foreign secretary Jack Straw it seemed clear that Bush had already made up his mind to take military action.

Straw came prepared with a Foreign Office legal analysis that showed, quite explicitly, that the No-Fly Zones had no standing in international law, neither under UN resolutions nor the Safwan agreement, and the new air strategy had no justification under criteria for "self-defense." The date of the legal analysis, originally written in March, reveals that a revised air plan was already being considered at that time. Bush legal analysts disagreed. According to the minutes of the July cabinet meeting, Blair concerned himself more with the structuring of a political and legal framework to permit action, exactly as George W. Bush did in the United States.

On August 5, the war plan briefing took place at the White House. General Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command and responsible for the operation, commented that "We want to continue to use response options to degrade the Iraqi Integrated Air Defense System." Franks told the group the U.S. had already flown over 4,000 sorties (since British aircraft were dropping about a third of the bomb tonnage, and their aircraft had smaller loads than the American ones, that suggests a total of more than 6,000 flights in the campaign so far).

Conducting the Air Campaign

During August, communications attacks continued, but the air defense system remained the major target. On September 16, 2002 Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asserted that United States and British aircraft flying over Iraq had changed their tactics, on his orders, more than a month earlier. Instead of simply responding when shot at, the aircraft were to target Iraq’s air defenses more broadly. It is now apparent that Rumsfeld’s statement was designed to put a public face on a much more ambitious aerial campaign designed to pave the way for an invasion of Iraq.

During September strikes reached a very high level, with five out of ten hitting the communications network and, significantly, another strike aimed at Iraqi naval defenses. One of the strikes, on September 5, involved approximately one hundred aircraft. Targeting the Iraqi communications network did not merely aim at degrading air defenses, it reduced the effectiveness of Saddam’s command structure overall. Since the goal of Southern Watch had always been protecting the sky, this indicates a major change in strategy.

Given the increased scale of the bombardment, it appears that Secretary Rumsfeld attempted to assuage the concerns of British legal experts. At a news conference on September 30, Rumsfeld declared that the purpose of the missions over Iraq was to perform "aerial weapons inspections," thus tenuously asserting a purpose more directly related to the UN resolutions. The CENTCOM press releases that routinely announced Southern Focus attacks began to say that aircraft were "monitoring compliance of United Nations Security Council Resolutions."

Yet, a total of 21,736 sorties were flown over southern Iraq between June 2002 and the beginning of the war, suggesting that over two thirds of them took place during the period beginning in September. Indeed, thousands of those attack sorties occurred before the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force (contingent on a fresh UN resolution) in October, and November, when the UN passed such a resolution (which, however, did not convey a final authorization to resort to force). In January 2003 the Washington Post reported that by that time there had been a total of sixty-two strikes aimed at Iraqi military command centers, communications facilities, and cable repeater stations, as opposed to thirty-six attacks on Iraqi radar or air-defense sites.

Among the data that reveal how much the Southern Focus air campaign differed from a simple response to Iraqi air defenses firing on U.S. or British aircraft, is the fact that Iraqi naval defenses were hit again. In fact, re-strikes on a variety of targets had the effect of continuing the suppression of Iraqi command nets. General Moseley’s forces also began a psychological warfare component involving leaflet drops, then began attacking Iraqi surface-to-surface missile sites, again targets that had nothing whatever to do with Iraqi air defense.

Southern Focus clearly had the function of facilitating an invasion but was in itself an act of war. Saddam Hussein never did react to the strikes in such a fashion as to provide Bush with a casus belli, but the attacks continued until the very moment of the March 2003 invasion.

Operation Southern Focus furnishes yet more evidence that George W. Bush, while talking diplomacy, pursued an aggressive war.

bellaciao.org

A necessary war?

Not according to U.N. monitors--or to U.S. intelligence, which has watched the situation even more carefully. By John Prados May/June 2003

[pp. 26-33 (vol. 59, no. 03) © 2003 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]

For months the Bush administration treated the world to a series of lurid claims about the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. By far the most expansive description of the threat was made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech before the U.N. Security Council on February 5. In a presentation replete with satellite photos and artists' conceptions, Powell argued that Iraq posed an ominous and urgent threat.

But was the Iraqi threat as imminent as advertised? And how did these versions of the Iraqi menace accord with what the public had previously been told? And what about the Iraqi threat required the rush to war?

Americans in particular need to consider what it all means. Despite administration assertions, the threat was by no means self-evident. Bush officials, except where it suited their interests, have discounted the findings of international inspectors who for most of a decade monitored Iraqi weapons programs.

And how different does the picture look if one focuses instead on the other authoritative source on Iraqi weapons issues--the U.S. intelligence community, which has followed Iraqi developments at least as keenly as U.N. monitoring teams?

A wealth of information

No classified sources were used in this analysis. The public record contains substantial information on intelligence findings about Iraq over the past decade. In part this is the result of official releases by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other data provided in reports mandated by Congress or in annual assessments of worldwide threats from the director of central intelligence. Other information has been released in response to public controversy or Freedom of Information Act requests.

The intense controversy in the 1990s over Gulf War Syndrome (and the question of what role CIA reporting may have had on the subject) led to substantial CIA reports and document releases. The desire to ascertain the effectiveness of the U.N. monitoring programs in Iraq also added to the public record. Mandated intelligence reporting on weapons of mass destruction and on ballistic missile threats to the United States resulted in more additions to the record. And there have been the usual leaks and revelations, often from official sources in the Clinton and Bush administrations. As a result, there is surprisingly ample information with which to compare the pre-March 19 assertions about the Iraqi threat. Because Powell's February 5 Security Council speech became the new benchmark for U.S. perception of the threat, this article will take the Powell presentation as a point of departure.

Nuclear weapons

Secretary Powell told the Security Council that "Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb," and the administration continued to use similarly alarmist rhetoric. [1] National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice invoked the image of a mushroom cloud if Iraq's nuclear weapons were not confiscated. And on February 20, Powell treated an audience of high school students to the assertion that "Iraq does not intend to use them [nuclear weapons] for peaceful purposes but to be aggressive against other nations." [2]

These statements implied that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program (not to mention the means of delivering nuclear weapons). But what did U.S. intelligence say about that? Although Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may have sat conspicuously behind Powell during Powell's U.N. speech--as if to lend the CIA's weight to the secretary's presentation--in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 11, he could muster nothing better than the declaration that "Iraq has established a pattern of clandestine procurements designed to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program." [3]

Last year, in its annual threat briefing, the CIA merely concluded that Iraq "retains a significant amount of dual-use infrastructure that could support a rejuvenated nuclear program." [4] In 2001 Tenet did not refer to the possibility of Iraqi nuclear weapons at all in his opening presentation. The year before that, his language was even less definitive: "Iraq probably has not given up its nuclear ambitions despite a decade of sanctions and inspections." [5] In 1999, the chief CIA analyst for nonproliferation, John A. Lauder, told a government commission that "Iraq probably has the personnel, documentation, and some equipment needed to continue nuclear-related work." [6]

Congress required the CIA to issue biannual reports on international acquisitions of technology related to weapons of mass destruction. The CIA's report for the first half of 2001 stated, "We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical RandD associated with its nuclear program." [7]

But in the second half of the year, the rhetoric, if not the facts, changed: "Saddam's repeated publicized exhortations to his 'Nuclear Mujahidin' to 'defeat the enemy' added to our concerns that since the Gulf war Iraq has continued research and development work associated with its nuclear program." [8]

In both reports, however, Iraqi nuclear efforts were viewed with more concern than earlier. The October 2002 CIA white paper contained greater, though not more concrete, detail: "Iraq retains its cadre of nuclear scientists and technicians, its program documentation, and sufficient dual-use manufacturing capabilities to support a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Iraqi media have reported numerous meetings between Saddam and nuclear scientists over the past two years, signaling Baghdad's continued interest in reviving a nuclear program." [9]

An equivalent British paper actually makes no reference to Iraq's nuclear program beyond the Gulf war, although it declares in its executive summary that Iraq "tried covertly to acquire technology and materials which could be used in the production of nuclear weapons." [10]

So what accounted for the change between the earlier and later assessments? There were no significant changes in the CIA's intelligence sources on Iraq, and in fact there was no real change in what the agency was reporting. The sole difference was the degree of threat being attributed to the same developments. This suggests that political pressure led the agency to alter its analytical judgments.

Declassified documents, public sources, and U.N. weapons inspectors' records all show something very interesting about the Iraqi nuclear program: Very considerable reconstitution would be necessary to make it work. In fact, the CIA claimed to have discovered every facility that was part of the program before the Gulf war, and asserted that almost every facility was heavily damaged during the war. For the most part, what the bombs did not get, the inspectors did, according to the CIA. The containment structures and above-ground control rooms of the reactors at Tuwaitha were destroyed and have not been restored. When visited by new contingents of U.N. inspectors (at least six times since November 2002), key buildings remained blackened rubble. In his January 27, 2003 report to the United Nations, International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamad El Baradei declared that his inspectors could find no evidence of an ongoing Iraqi nuclear weapons program. [11]

Most of Secretary Powell's discussion of nuclear issues at the Security Council focused on the acquisition of weapons-grade material. The dispute over whether Iraq had attempted to acquire aluminum tubes to use in the construction of gas centrifuges is fairly well known. In fact, the CIA and other agencies are well aware that new materials are vital if any weapon is to be crafted. Every one of the reports quoted above emphasized this need. The October 2002 CIA white paper projected that indigenous production of uranium ore, if it could be combined with a successfully established enrichment program, would permit Iraq to create "a deliverable nuclear weapon" some time in the second half of this decade. The agency claimed that Iraq could build a bomb within a year with material from foreign sources, but said that avenue had been closed by the existing sanctions regime. [12] Before the Gulf war, the CIA believed Iraq was on track to produce 100--125 kilograms of highly enriched uranium a year--if it built a cascade of some 5,000 gas centrifuges. [13] The Iraqis had worked with electromagnetic separation, and had succeeded before the war in enriching some uranium in this way, but the program never reached industrial scale. Soon after the war, the CIA established that the Iraqis had actually produced only 3--10 kilograms before August 1990, using all separation methods combined--at least one reason why Saddam's "crash program" to develop a weapon during the course of the Gulf war, was a failure. [14] No enrichment program on such a scale exists today. One newspaper report in 1999 claimed that Iraq had set up a gaseous diffusion plant at Al Ubur, but neither the CIA, the British, nor Secretary Powell made any charges regarding such a facility. [15]

Biological weapons

The greatest fears seem to be attached to Iraqi efforts to create biological weapons. In his U.N. speech, Powell argued that Baghdad resisted admitting to having biologicals for four years after the Gulf war, that these weapons are very destructive, and that Iraq had never accounted for its existing weapons. In 1995, Iraq declared it had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax, but inspectors estimated that it could have produced 25,000 liters, and that there were at one time 400 bombs filled with the agent. "This is evidence, not conjecture," the secretary said. "This is true." [16]

On the other hand, in George Tenet's worldwide threat briefings in 2000, Iraq was simply lumped in with a dozen other states thought either to possess or to be actively pursuing biological weapons. In 2001, no specific mention was made of biologicals, which were instead lumped together with all weapons of mass destruction. Of Iraq, the CIA director simply declared: "Our most serious concern with Saddam Hussein must be the likelihood that he will seek a renewed WMD capability."

Tenet also commented significantly on intent: Iraq, he said, sought a bioweapons capacity "both for credibility and because every other strong regime in the region either has it or is pursuing it." [17] He made no claims about Iraq attacking either the United States or a neighboring state. In both 2000 and 2001, the CIA emphasized Iraq's deteriorating economic situation.

In 2002 the briefing suggested that Iraq was continuing to build and expand its infrastructure for producing undifferentiated weapons of mass destruction. Not until the white paper of October 2002 does the CIA mention thousands of liters of biological agents, or offer a map of Iraqi research and production facilities.

Interestingly enough, that white paper tied the Iraqi admission of biological programs to the 1995 defection of Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, but U.S. intelligence had all along been aware of Iraq's bioweapons efforts. Gulf war documents contain dozens of reports and cables detailing every aspect of the Iraqi program, and they discussed all but a couple of the Iraqi research and production installations. In other words, U.S. intelligence reports before 2002 were made in full knowledge of the Iraqi biological infrastructure. (Incidentally, the British intelligence paper complementing the CIA's October 2002 report actually accepted the Iraqi figure for its stock of anthrax, suggesting no production between 1995 and 2003.) Moreover, none of the recent alarmist claims mentioned the possible degradation of bioweapon stocks.

Much was made in the Powell speech of precursor chemicals and mobile laboratories. Clearly Iraq's potential for production depended on means and mechanisms. If every drop of growth medium and germ could be utilized to grow toxic spores, Saddam's stocks would have been considerably enlarged. However, no one should make the mistake of supposing that the alleged mobile laboratories could have produced agents on the scale of fixed installations or with equivalent purity and quality. Permissible temperature ranges, isolation requirements, and handling problems would all constrain operations in mobile labs. Powell suggested that Iraq had seven laboratories on wheels; if so, they would have had only a tiny fraction of the capacity of fixed industrial plants.

Gulf war documents indicate that before August 1990 Iraq was producing 1,000 tons a year of biologicals. The numbers cited most recently by both U.S. and British sources (for anthrax, botulinum, and other biological weapons) added up to just a few dozen tons. Observers can agree that bioweapons are Iraq's most dangerous weapons, but stocks are limited and means of delivery are another issue. The use of biologicals in the absence of robust stocks of antidotes and countermeasures would be worse than stupid--and no charges were made that Saddam had stockpiled antidotes.

Chemical weapons

Aside from Iraq's use of deception to preserve its programs, Secretary Powell and others have used Saddam's chemical weapons programs to substantiate their claims of an imminent Iraqi threat. Because Iraq actually did use chemical weapons during its war with Iran in the 1980s, and is widely believed to have used them against the Kurds at home, assertions that chemical weapons posed an active threat were credible and easy to make. At the United Nations, Colin Powell raised the previous use of chemical agents, added that Iraq had never accounted for vast amounts of its chemical weapons, and said that Baghdad's declarations on the subject were replete with lies. The conservative U.S. estimate, Powell told the Security Council, was that Iraq retained between 100 and 500 tons of chemical agents.

Director Tenet told the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 2000 that "we assume [Saddam] continues to attach high priority to preserving a WMD infrastructure." [18] The CIA's report on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for the first half of that year fleshed this out by stating that after the Desert Fox bombing of Iraq that took place at the end of 1998, after Saddam ended all U.N. weapons inspections, "Baghdad again instituted a reconstitution effort on those facilities destroyed by U.S. bombing, including several critical missile production complexes and former dual-use CW [chemical weapons] production facilities." [19] The agency worried that discrepancies in Iraqi reporting indicated that Saddam might have hidden up to 6,000 chemical munitions from U.N. inspectors. The CIA's report for the second half of the year repeated that concern, but only asserted: "We assess that, since December 1998, Iraq has increased its capability to pursue chemical warfare (CW) programs." [20]

Analysts mentioned the rebuilding of facilities and Iraq's efforts in international markets to procure dual-use items that could be adapted to chemical weapons production, not an active weapons program. When the CIA answered questions for the record after Tenet's 2002 worldwide threat briefing, their formulation downplayed the issue: "Baghdad is expanding its chemical industry in ways that could be diverted quickly to CW agent production." None of these reports claimed that Iraq was actually producing chemical weapons. But in the agency's October 2002 white paper, although the discussion portion of the study used similar language, the judgments section baldly declared: "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX." [21] The numbers Powell used in February 2003, 100--500 tons, are identical to those in the October CIA report.

Intelligence assessments and reporting during and after the Gulf war provide important perspective on these projections. For one thing, the Iraqi stockpile was nothing like what it was in the past. According to the CIA's own estimates, Iraq was producing chemical agents at a rate of 2,000 tons per year by the end of the Iraq-Iran war in 1988, and that rate was projected to reach 4,000 tons by 1993. [22] One plant alone--Samarra--was manufacturing 720 tons of mustard gas and 96 of VX annually. [23] The size of the Iraqi stockpile at the start of the Gulf war was put at 1,000 tons. Whatever Iraqi capabilities were in 2002, they did not reach that level.

The threat-mongering also said nothing about the longevity of the Iraqi stockpile. At the time of the Gulf war, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency disputed the shelf life of Iraqi chemical agents. Although the storage problem had no doubt been solved in part by the creation of binary weapons (weapons whose components are not mixed together until use), a number of the Gulf war documents attested to Baghdad's continuing difficulties with ensuring the purity and stability of precursor chemicals and the integrity of the manufacturing process. Iraqi technology may have improved in 2003, but the need to carry on a program under a microscope, as it were, would have had negative effects on production quality as well.

Finally, there is the question of actual use on the battlefield. Blanketing a combat theater with chemical agents consumes large quantities of materials. One CIA analysis early in the Gulf war concluded that 600 tons of new agent, combined with leftover materials, would probably suffice for about a week of high-intensity fighting. [24] At that rate, the 500-ton stockpile estimated before March would last less than six days. Chemical weapons should be seen as tactical weapons. It will be tragic if the mechanism chosen to force Iraq to give up its chemical arsenal is to induce Baghdad to use its chemical weapons against an invading army.

Delivery and usage

Year after year Iraqi missiles have been discussed in some detail in intelligence reports. As with weapons of mass destruction in general, there was a body of wider-ranging reports on world developments that include Iraq. A national intelligence estimate (NIE) was done in 1995 and another in December 2001. Other reports went to Congress in September 1999 and again at the end of 2001 (an unclassified version of the NIE).

The 1995 NIE was attacked by proponents of missile defenses and by Israeli sources, both of whom pointed to an Iranian threat. The CIA had assessed that a missile threat to the continental United States was unlikely before 2015. After its assessment was attacked, the CIA set up a review panel led by former CIA director Robert M. Gates; that panel saw no problem with the assessment.

Congress then set up a commission on missile threats under then-private citizen Donald Rumsfeld. The "Rumsfeld commission" concluded in July 1998 that the missile threat had been greatly underestimated, and the pressure caused by the commission's report was reflected in the 1999 paper by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the same body responsible for the NIEs.

The 1999 NIC paper held that much of Iraq's missile infrastructure had been destroyed in the Gulf War, but that Baghdad "could" test a missile capable of reaching the United States within a few years using either Scud technology or something based on its Al Abbas design (identified as a space launch vehicle) or on a North Korean rocket. [25] Robert D. Walpole, the national intelligence officer for strategic weapons, noted that analysts were all over the map when it came to predicting the date for a test flight. These differences persisted in the 2001 NIE, which noted that "most agencies . . . believe that Iraq is unlikely to [test an intercontinental ballistic missile] even if the [U.N.] prohibitions are lifted." Instead, the NIE concluded, Baghdad would reconstitute its Scud force to pre--Gulf war levels and design some sort of medium-range missile. The NIE noted the U.S. belief that Iraq had retained a covert force of extended-range Scuds, which Baghdad called Al Husseins. [26]

This covert Scud force grew to greater proportions in the October 2002 CIA white paper, which listed both the Al Abbas and the Al Hussein. The Al Hussein was described as having been flight-tested between 1988 and 1990, but the paper did not mention that in both the 1999 and 2001 NIEs the test was described as a failure. The white paper claimed that Iraq has developed medium-range (up to 3,000 kilometer) "concepts," and developed the Badr-2000, a two-stage missile with an estimated range of 750--1,000 kilometers. The CIA's technology acquisition report for the last half of 2001 cited facilities for solid-propellant casting, saying that "we can find no logical explanation for the size and configuration of these mixing buildings other than an Iraqi intention to develop longer-range, prohibited missiles (that is, to mix solid propellant exclusively geared for such missiles)." [27] This was repeated in the white paper.

Secretary Powell's U.N. speech went even further; Powell claimed Iraq had huge engine-testing stands, and accused it of pursuing a 1,200-kilometer-range system.

No evidence--other than a photo of an engine test stand--was presented to support the claim for the development of medium-or long-range missiles. Baghdad had no flight test program and had not built any hardware. Nor had it ever been demonstrated that a covert force of Al Abbas Scud variants in fact existed, though observers may want to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on that score. (Space precludes a discussion of the Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicle program, except to say its existence had been known from at least the early 1990s. Only recently has the program been viewed with alarm.)

Unmentioned in any of this were the Al Abbas's serious in-flight stability problems. Longer atmospheric re-entry at extended range, higher temperatures, greater acceleration, all impact on the Scud airframe, a nearly 50-year-old design. These pressures caused more missiles to break up than were intercepted by Patriot anti-ballistic missiles in 1990--91. Several of the CIA Gulf war documents record their poor performance. Since the systems were now prohibited, Iraq could not conduct flight tests to correct the problems. Using the same Scud technology as the basis for a medium-range missile would have been foolhardy at best. Iraq had no experience with a two-stage or larger rocket.

The short-range Al Samoud missile had been listed in CIA reports as exceeding the permitted 150-kilometer range for some time. Reports on weapons of mass destruction note the transporter/launchers for the rocket and its solid-fuel counterpart had been paraded on recent ceremonial occasions in Baghdad. In late February, Iraq agreed to destroy the missiles. About half the known forces of these missiles were destroyed before the United States began its war against Iraq.

Use 'em or lose 'em?

Finally there was the question of Saddam's intent to use whatever weapons he may have had. The Gulf war documents make clear there was close control over the Iraqi arsenal. Kamel told the CIA in 1995 that the use of weapons of mass destruction had been raised several times within the Iraqi high command, but always rejected. [28] Saddam was cited elsewhere as believing the United States would have retaliated with tactical nuclear weapons if he had used his biological ones. [29] The agency itself concluded that Saddam considered the biologicals his strategic retaliatory force. Most recently, on October 7, 2002, Director Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee declassifying the "senior intelligence witness's" statement that in response to a U.S.-initiated attack that put Saddam in danger of defeat, the chances of his use of weapons of mass destruction were "pretty high, in my view." [30]

What is clear from intelligence reporting is that until about 1998 the CIA was fairly comfortable with its assessments on Iraq, but from that time on the agency gradually buckled under the weight of pressures to adopt alarmist views. In fact, the looming threat of the day--Iran--has gradually been eclipsed even though it, like North Korea, had--and has--more questionable and more highly developed programs in several areas than had Iraq. [See "Iran: Furor over Fuel," by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, p. 12.]

After mid-2001 the rush to judgment on Iraq became a stampede. It is fair to suspect that CIA analysts did not approve of the cast being given to their reporting.

Conversely, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had little real need to create his own in-house intelligence staff to furnish threat information on Iraq--George Tenet's CIA had already been hounded into doing just that. The Iraqi threat was nothing like the Soviet one, but intelligence had been manipulated just the same.

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1. Colin Powell speech, printed in the New York Times, Feb. 6, 2003, p. A15 (subsequent references to Powell's speech are to this text).
2. Cortland Milloy, "On the Spot, Colin Powell Disappoints," Washington Post, February 26, 2003, p. B1 (Powell's taped television appearance was aired on February 20).

3. CIA, "DCI's Worldwide Threat Briefing: Evolving Dangers in a Complex World," February 11, 2003, prepared text, p. 5.
4. CIA, "Unclassified Responses to Questions for the Record," April 8, 2002, p. 10.
5. CIA, "Statement by Central Intelligence Agency Director Tenet: The Worldwide Threat in 2000: Global Realities of Our National Security," March 21, 2000, State Department press release.
6. CIA, "Unclassified Statement for the Record by Special Assistant to the DCI for Nonproliferation," April 29, 1999, p. 3.
7. CIA, "Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 January Through 30 June 2001," p. 5 (no date).
8. CIA, "Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 July Through 31 December, 2001," p. 4 (no date).
9. CIA, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," October 2002, p. 6.
10. United Kingdom, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government," no date (September 2002), pp. 13--14, 6.
11. New York Times, January 28, 2003.
12. CIA, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," p. 6. There is no evidence for the additional claim in the paper that "Baghdad may have acquired uranium enrichment capabilities that could shorten substantially the amount of time necessary to make a nuclear weapon," which is probably a reference to the issue of centrifuge tubes.
13. CIA, "Iraqi Nuclear Program," January 1991 (declassified May 26, 1996), paragraph 39. Gulf War Documents, Federation of American Scientists (hereafter cited as "GWD"). The centrifuges were to be modified versions of the Urenco G-1 or G-2 models, plans for which were apparently acquired by Iraq. The Iraqi program had succeeded in separating some material by electromagnetic means, and calutrons were under development. Significantly, electric power requirements for enrichment were and remained a problem, and would have been a huge problem at the production levels the CIA was predicting.
14. CIA, Director 770775, "Iraqi Nuclear [Program]," July 1991, GWD.
15. Kenneth R. Timmerman, "Iraq May Soon Have the Bomb," Wall Street Journal, March 18, 1999.
16. Powell, U.N. speech.
17. CIA, "Statement by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet: The Worldwide Threat in 2001: National Security in a Changing World," Senate Armed Services Committee, March 7, 2001, pp. 6--7.
18. Ibid.
19. CIA, "Technology Acquisition Report, 1 January to 30 June 2001," p. 4.
20. CIA, "Technology Acquisition Report, 1 July to 31 December 2001," p. 5.
21. CIA, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs," p. 2.
22. CIA, "Iraq's Chemical Warfare Program: More Self-Reliant, More Deadly: A Research Paper," no date (information as of August 1990), released July 2, 1996, p. 2.
23. CIA, Director 119743, "Iraqi BW/CW," December 1991 (released May 10, 1996), p. 2.
24. CIA, "Iraq's Potential for Chemical and Biological Warfare," September 1990 (released June 18, 1996), p. 6.
25. CIA/NIC, "Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015," September 1999, p. 8.
26. CIA/NIC, "Unclassified Summary of a National Intelligence Estimate: Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015," December 2001, p. 6.
27. CIA, "Technology Acquisition Report, 1 July to 31 December 2001," p. 5.
28. CIA, "Iraq's Non-Use of Chemical or Biological Weapons During the Gulf War," August 1995 (released July 2, 1996), p. 2. Kamel's "somewhat unclear" recollection is that the proposals might have been brought by Saddam's sons Uday or Qusay, or by his brother-in-law Sabbawi Al Tikriti.
29. CIA, Division of Near East and South Asia Analysis, "Review of NESA Files for Information Relating to 'Gulf War Veterans' Illness," February 1996 (released June 26, 1996), p. 4. This paper includes the statement that by May 1993--before the Kamel defection--the CIA had reached the conclusion that despite having numerous chemical and biological munitions, Saddam had considered and rejected using them, but that he planned to use them to retaliate for a nuclear attack on Baghdad (p. 3).
30. CIA Director George Tenet, letter to Sen. Bob Graham, October 7, 2002, p. 2.

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