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Jonathan Friendly is the national editor of , which owns the weekly Jewish newspapers in Detroit and Atlanta. He is a former journalism professor at the University of Michigan and a former reporter and editor at The New York Times.
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By Jonathan Friendly
February 15, 2004
Americans concerned about the future of Israel should be paying close attention to the current debate over the quality of intelligence that was available about Iraq when President George W. Bush and his advisers were deciding to launch a war.
It is increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein still cherished the idea of building nuclear, chemical and biological weapons but that Iraq's capability to do that was far more severely limited than the intelligence community thought. It was certainly far less immediately threatening than Bush pictured it in his drive to depose Hussein.
A special commission will, correctly, probe that inaccuracy and may recommend changes in American intelligence systems. But the inquiry will do little to assist Israel whose own intelligence apparatus is apparently as flawed when it came to Iraq - even though Iraq had long been one of its most threatening neighbors.
Israel carefully appeared not to be playing any role in the American conquest of Hussein's government. Obviously it would not have been a welcome overt partner in the "coalition of the willing" that the U.S. was trying to assemble and that it hoped might include Mideastern states in addition to the docile Kuwait.
But you can bet your bottom dollar that everything Israeli intelligence knew or thought it knew about Baghdad's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction was fully shared with the Central Intelligence Agency. Israel was the only country with first-hand knowledge of how the Iraqi Scud missiles had worked in 1991. Even more important, it is the country that stood in the greatest peril from whatever Hussein's military scientists cooked up and thus the most likely to have worked to put spies in place in his government. It was very much in Israel's interest to be rid of Hussein and to help America accomplish that goal.
In a speech last week at Georgetown University C.I.A. director George J. Tenet noted at several points that the National Intelligence Estimate that was so crucial to the Bush case for preemptive war was based on "human sources" as opposed to spy satellites or other technology. "Several sensitive reports," said Tenet, "crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable." Perhaps those were European partners, but it seems far more likely he was talking about Mossad. As the case of Jonathan Pollard showed, the American and Israeli intelligence services don't share absolutely everything, but in this case they were surely hand-in-hand.
The point of having an intelligence service is to keep accurate tabs on what your enemies are up to. With nuclear, biological and chemical weapons technologies so readily available - the head of Pakistan's nuclear weapons labs has been selling his know-how all over - and with martyrdom apparently such an appealing tactic to suicide bombers and Muslim clerics, Israel had better be doing a first-rate job of staying informed about the weapons work of its Arab neighbors. Sure, it has its own nuclear bombs, but if you don't know who is getting ready to attack you and how, those bombs aren't going to be a very credible deterrent.
America and Israel may have gotten a little bit complacent about their ability to use high-tech systems to track what the bad guys are up to. But they also need reliable "humint" - human intelligence, otherwise known as spies - if they are going to be ready to preempt would-be attackers. The Iraq intelligence fiasco should provide a wake-up call on both sides of the Atlantic.
Views expressed by the author do not
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