WMD, Again

If I can find the time, I'm keen to read certain portions of the Senate Committee report.

The focus of the inquiry is, ostensibly, the recent CIA estimate on Iraq's weapons capabilities. How do the conclusions reached in that connection redound to other relatively independent assessments of Iraq's WMD possessions which have been offered up over the years - for example, The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security by the last head of UNSCOM, Richard Butler; or Endgame : Solving the Iraq Crisis, by the then-unreconstructed Scott Ritter?

For that matter, what of the kind of thing which William Shawcross recounts in Allies: The U.S., Britain, and Europe, and the War in Iraq?

"One senior British politician, Paddy Ashdown, recalled in his diaries that when he went to see Blair on a domestic matter at the end of 1997, all Blair could talk about was the threat from Saddam's WMD: 'I have now seen some of the [intelligence] stuff on this,' he told Ashdown. 'It really is pretty scary. [Saddam] is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction. I don't understand why the French and others don't understand this. We cannot let hims get away with it. The world thinks this is gamesmanship. But it's deadly serious.' " [emphasis added]

In other words, it wasn't only in 2002 that only the CIA reached affirmative conclusions about Iraq and WMD - there is the UNSCOM legacy, as well as the conclusions of foreign Intelligence agencies, not to mention conclusions reached under the Clinton Administration (which led to drastic measures such as Operation Desert Fox). Whatever was inadequate, even culpably so, in recent conclusions of the CIA surely cannot wipe away the wide and deep body of opinion that it was reasonable to err on the assumption that Iraq retained WMD.

Thinking of Hume's humorous formulation in On Miracles, what would be the greater "miracle" - that Iraq had WMD and somehow managed to dispose of them before the invasion, or that multiple apparently authoritative individuals and Intelligence agencies, over a span of years, wrongly believed that Iraq was hiding WMD , especially in light of Iraq's history from the '80's onwards? (Yes there are more nuanced possibilities than this stark dichotomy suggests, but a simplistic rendering focuses on the "fundamental alternative")