Did faulty US intelligence trigger the Gulf conflict or was that part of the plan Atmane Tazaghart aljazeerah.info

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Did faulty US intelligence trigger the Gulf conflict or was that part of the plan Atmane Tazaghart

The start of the war on Iraq came as no surprise to most ordinary people; after all, the war was initiated less than two hours after President George W. Bush’s ultimatum to Baghdad expired.
The timing of the military campaign did, however, come as a surprise to many experts, who saw it as having been inappropriate in certain aspects.
The southern front had to contend with extremely adverse weather conditions. Severe dust storms made it extremely difficult for the Americans and British to advance, and resulted in breakdowns and accidents.
On the northern front, the Americans had not settled their arguments with Ankara when the decision to attack was made. The Turkish Parliament had not even decided to allow the Americans to use the country’s airspace.
The stated reason why the Americans decided to rush their attack on Baghdad was a CIA report that said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was meeting with his top military advisers at a location in the Iraqi capital’s southern suburbs.
According to sources in the Bush administration, CIA director George Tenet asked for an urgent meeting with Bush in the White House on Thursday, March 20, in which he gave an assessment as to the likely period of time the Iraqi leader would remain at that location. Two-and-a-half-hours later, Bush gave the order to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership with cruise missiles.
But the Americans were not fast or accurate enough. The attack failed to hit Saddam Hussein and his top generals. Nevertheless, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the decision to strike, saying that it afforded a valuable and unique opportunity to destroy the Iraqi leadership.
Yet strategic and intelligence experts have disputed Rumsfeld’s assessment. In interviews for The Daily Star in Paris, two French experts (one a specialist on military intelligence, and the other, General Pierre Gallois, a military strategist) poured scorn on American tactics.
Asked whether the decision to bring forward the attack on Baghdad in keeping with the CIA tip-off was the correct one, the French intelligence expert said: “I believe that the decision was precipitate and premature, and had the effect of kick-starting the war in spite of adverse weather conditions in the south, and a vague military situation in the north. Of course, had the initial strike been successful in eliminating the Iraqi leadership, no one would be asking now whether it was the right decision to take. But since it was not, it is safe to say that precipitate action threw the strategy that was drawn beforehand into confusion.
“Besides the negative implications of the CIA-inspired decision to decapitate the Iraqi leadership, and notwithstanding whether Saddam was at the location bombed on March 20 or not, it was a grave error of judgment to use cruise missiles to take out the Iraqi president. It demonstrated that the CIA had failed to learn the lessons of past mistakes.
“There is no doubt that the idea of using cruise missiles to assassinate an individual or group of individuals has been shown to be ineffective. When the Americans bombed Tripoli in 1986, they failed to assassinate Moammar Gadhafi in spite of the fact that the CIA had pinpointed his location beforehand. The attempt to decapitate Al-Qaeda leaders in Sudan and Afghanistan in August 1998 was a fiasco as well. Cruise missile attacks on Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001 failed to kill any of that organization’s leaders who are still at large. In fact, those Al-Qaeda leaders who were apprehended such as Mohammed Atef were caught using means other than missile and air attacks.”
However, Gallois (author of the French theory of nuclear deterrence) disagreed with his compatriot that the CIA was solely to blame for the fiasco. “According to military logic,” he explains, “the decision to go to war is always taken by the top military leadership. Consequently, responsibility for such a decision rests with that leadership. Needless to say, many factors play a part in taking a decision to launch military action including intelligence. Yet it is wrong to believe that such a decision could have been made solely on intelligence information, however accurate.”
Gallois added: “In principle, the CIA or any other intelligence organization can only be accountable for the accuracy of the information it provides. It is the duty of an intelligence organization to report any useful information it receives to the leadership, together with its assessment on how best to act on it. It is, however, for the political and military leadership to make decisions on how to proceed. It is not the duty of intelligence organizations to decide on when and how to go to war; this is the sole preserve of the military leadership and must remain so. Their responsibility begins and ends with providing the information that helps military commanders make their decisions.”
Asked whether he believes the CIA
is indeed running the American-led war on Iraq on behalf of the generals, the French intelligence expert said: “The issue not only concerns that report that led to the premature commencement of military action. From the very beginning, the CIA played a dubious role in inciting the Bush administration against Iraq by feeding it questionable information and erroneous reports.
“Iraq’s inclusion in the ‘axis of evil’ did not surprise those who knew how it came about. Alleged ties between Iraq and
Al-Qaeda were first mentioned at a meeting of the Defense Policy Board (under the now discredited Richard Perle) on Sept. 26, 2001. As a result of that meeting, Rumsfeld asked his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to compile a report on the issue, which he did, relying on information provided by the CIA. The report was duly delivered to Bush on Nov. 22, 2001.”
“Wolfowitz’s report contained four pieces of evidence the CIA said proved the existence of a link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda (all of which were tenuous, if not totally false). The evidence:
l “That Iraq established links with
Al-Qaeda in Sudan in 1993 through the mediation of Sudanese Islamists.
l “That Ramzi Yusuf, who was accused of masterminding the first attack on New York’s World Trade Center, was an Iraqi intelligence agent before joining
Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s.
l “That Farouk Hijazi, the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey (and former head of Iraqi intelligence) traveled to Kandahar in December 1998 and met with Osama bin Laden.
l “That Samir al-Hami, Iraq’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, met in Prague with (suicide hijacker) Mohammed Atta prior to Sept. 11.”
The French intelligence expert described this evidence of Iraq’s alleged links with Al-Qaeda as highly inaccurate. The Prague meeting, for example, was subsequently proved to have been a work of fiction. According to Czech intelligence, Hami did meet with a man named Atta but he was not the Mohammed Atta.
The question now being raised is this: Did the CIA mess up? Or was all this intentional? It was odd indeed that a person known (and documented) throughout his stay in Germany as Mohammed al-Amir should suddenly be renamed Mohammed Atta shortly after Sept. 11.
The intelligence expert went on to say that the rest of the evidence presented by the CIA was vague, unverifiable, and downright laughable. The CIA’s assertion that Ramzi Yusuf was an Iraqi agent before he joined Al-Qaeda was dubious, to say the least, especially since the agency was totally ignorant of his role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center until two years later. When Yusuf was finally apprehended in the Philippines, the CIA took a whole year to work out the real identity of the “mysterious Pakistani” they had arrested!
Yet despite its obvious flaws, that report which Bush received in the critical period following the Sept. 11 attacks established the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda firmly in his mind.
The rest, as they say, is history.

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