The explanation offered here also raises doubts about reports that before the war Saddam sent stockpiles of WMD outside the country--perhaps to Syria--for "safekeeping" (assuming, for the moment, that Iraq had retained stocks of WMD). If Saddam was optimistic about his prospects, why would he have done so? Just as he ordered the Iraqi air force in February 2003 to dismantle and bury several dozen of its most advanced combat aircraft to protect them from air attacks (rather than sending them abroad as he did in 1991), why wouldn't he have ordered that retained stocks of WMD--if any indeed existed--be buried or otherwise hidden in Iraq?

Thus, whether due to folly (Saddam's misplaced optimism and misreading of U.S. capabilities and intentions), realism (his belief in the limited utility of CBW in such a war), prudence (the fear of massive retaliation), or a combination of the above, Saddam viewed CBW as neither weapons of first nor last resort, but rather as "weapons of no resort" in a war with the United States. He apparently believed that Iraq's conventional and paramilitary forces, the threat to demolish Iraq's oil fields (thereby denying the United States access to Iraq's vast oil wealth), and his Franco-Russian diplomatic "safety net", not CBW, were his ultimate trump cards in facing down the United States. Once again, Saddam appears to have miscalculated, this time with likely fatal consequences for him and his regime.²

Lessons Learned?

What are the intelligence and policy implications of this assessment? First, Saddam seemed to discount the seriousness of U.S. preparations to topple him, despite a military buildup on Iraq's borders and numerous leaks to the media that accurately described American plans. There was no failure to communicate clearly; U.S. intentions were neither veiled nor ambiguous. The problem was how to convince an insular, isolated leader, captive to entrenched attitudes and deeply ingrained habits of thought, of the credibility of U.S. threats (not that war could have otherwise been averted). How does one assess an enemy leader's state of mind and influence deep-seated attitudes and mindsets, in order to avert miscalculation during crises and wars? And what does this say about the potential for miscalculation in an increasingly proliferated and dangerous world?

Second, the invasion of Iraq demonstrated a paradox of postmodern war: The force needed to invade a foreign country and overthrow its regime may be much smaller than that required to convince the regime's leadership that it faces a threat to its survival. Thus, when tailoring a force package for purposes of deterring or compelling an adversary, U.S. policymakers and military planners should not only consider objective planning factors, but should also take into account the expectations of foreign leaders regarding the kind of force that it would take to threaten the regime's vital interests or pose a threat to its survival. Information operations may have an important role to play in influencing enemy assumptions and bridging this perception gap.

Third, intelligence analysts and policymakers need to understand better how proliferators think about and plan to use WMD and to re-evaluate their own fundamental assumptions on the subject. In both 1991 and 2003, it was widely assumed that Iraq would assign a central role to WMD in deterrence and warfighting. In both cases, however, Iraq sought to deter or thwart the designs of the United States by a combination of political and conventional military means and perhaps, in the latter case, by deceiving its enemies regarding its WMD capabilities. Furthermore, how does one factor the possibility of deception into intelligence assessments and policy discussions, without succumbing to the type of systematic overestimation of an adversary's WMD capabilities that led to the intelligence failures that preceded Operation Iraqi Freedom (where lack of evidence regarding WMD was seen as proof of the effectiveness of Iraqi denial and deception measures)?

Finally, intelligence analysts and policymakers need to understand better how Iraq's political and military leadership perceived events leading up to and during the invasion and what actually happened during the war. They need to come to some kind of understanding about whether decision-making images and processes in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were unique or whether they reflected pathologies typical of decision-making in other authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. And they need to understand how such pathologies may affect adversary perceptions and behavior during crises and wars.

These questions are not just of academic interest but are highly relevant to the challenges the United States faces in Iran and North Korea--and therefore must be answered. If U.S. intelligence analysts and policymakers fail to understand the assumptions and choices of enemies in past wars, they will almost surely be surprised again by enemies in future wars.

1 The regime likewise had long-standing contingency plans to deal with the possibility that it might be ousted by domestic rivals, and would once again have to go underground, reorganize and seize power, as it did between 1963 and 1968. Such planning may have also facilitated the emergence of the Sunni Arab insurgency following the conclusion of major combat operations in May 2003.

2  See also Michael Eisenstadt, "Iraq and After: Taking the Right Lessons for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction", Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Defense University, May 2005.

Essay Types: Essay