"Garbage After Garbage After Garbage"

The problem wasn't really that the US wasn't sharing any WMD intelligence with the UN inspectors.  It was that the intelligence they provided didn't turn anything up.  As someone involved memorably told CBS, it was "garbage after garbage after garbage."  Jacqueline Shire and Jeffrey Lewis also talk a little about it here, and you can get corroboration from the Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase 1 report, here, but the US was a key source of intelligence for UNMOVIC.  The intelligence was just all terrible!

This is sometimes murky, so even folks who opposed the war at the time might sometimes find it hard to recall.  But it was actually much worse than that the US seemed to be withholding information in a wholesale fashion.  Once you realized that what they did have was junk, the case for war became even crappier than it already was.

Part of the murkiness, I should add, was because the Bush administration found it to be in their interest to downplay their cooperation with the UN inspectors after their leads turned out to be useless.  This was perhaps the most bizarre turn: American officials used the UN's failure to turn anything up -- using, in large part, American intelligence -- as a basis for arguing that the UN's inspectors were incompetent.

Comments

[Scott K]

I don't find it too hard to recall, as one of the folks opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning. I'm not a hardcore pacifist-- I do tend to favor a non-military solution, but I can't help but arrive at the conclusion that there are certain situations where there are really no other options left (for example, WWII).

However, it was stunningly obvious to me that the rationale for war was manufactured out of thin cloth. The whole argument really reduced to only a few premises, all of which were not strongly supported by a reality-based analysis of available evidence and basic human psychology. But then, I claim a certain amount of expertise in nuclear-related matters by virtue of my profession, and had learned to respect the IAEA's expertise in such matters. So when they were extremely unwilling to endorse the "official" US position on such matters, that was a pretty clear red flag which led me to consider other issues in a skeptical light.

Unfortunately, I think that the majority of Americans at the time were simply swept up by a mob mentality. That is hardly unprecedented-- at risk of over-using my references, see Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s... note that Germany and Japan were of completely different psychological mentalities. I can only hope that the current state of affairs improves and that we are able to stay away from such territory for a decade or two, at least. (Yeah, I'm cynical... I'm not completely convinced that we didn't end up on the "right side" of some conflicts based on anything except dumb luck.)

[drip]

It isn't hard to recall Blix asking the Americans to tell him where the weapons were so he could go inspect them. It also wasn't hard to look at the satellite pictures Powell tried to pawn off as evidence and wondering where the high resolution version that could read license plates from space was. They had nothing.