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Israeli General Criticizes Tel Aviv’s Role in Assessing Iraqi WMD Capabilities
An Israeli brigadier general has accused Israeli intelligence of being involved, along with U.S and British intelligence services, in overstating Iraq’s prewar WMD capabilities, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Dec. 4). In a report for Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom said that Israeli intelligence provided “an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities,” leading to “the possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated.” “In the questioning of the picture painted by coalition intelligence, the third party in this intelligence failure, Israel, has remained in the shadows,” the report says. “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s nonconventional capabilities,” it adds. The report accuses intelligence agencies of having had a “one-dimensional perception” of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. “At the heart of this perception lay the colorful portrait of an embodiment of evil, a man possessed by a compulsion to develop weapons of mass destruction in order to strike Israel and others, regardless of additional considerations,” it says. A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refused to comment on the report (Molly Moore, Washington Post, Dec. 5). Israeli lawmaker Yossi Sarid has called for an inquiry into Israeli intelligence on prewar Iraq, saying the assessment of Iraq’s WMD capabilities could have an impact on future assessments. “We’ve lost credibility both domestically and internationally” by exaggerating the threat, Sarid said. “If we now come with grave data about Iran’s arming with weapons of mass destruction, who is going to take us seriously? They might say, ‘It’s hard to believe you because you exaggerated about Iraq,’” he added (Joshua Mitnick, Washington Times, Dec. 5). Some Israeli lawmakers and academics, however, have criticized Brom’s report, according to the Associated Press. While agreeing that there was a failure to assess Iraq’s WMD capabilities accurately, Yuval Steinitz, head of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that “to say Israel is the prime mover in this is extremely farfetched.” “They haven’t found Saddam, either, but does that mean there was no Saddam Hussein?” said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat research center at Bar-Illan University (Associated Press/USA Today, Dec. 5).
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