A Couple of “Talking Points”

by Patrick Lang

#1 (paraphrasing) – “It was the policy of the Clinton Administration as sanctioned by by the ‘Iraq Liberation Act of 1998’ that Saddam’s government should be overthrown.”

In 1998 I had conversations with the Senate staffers who had drafted the “Iraq Liberation Act.” These men were determined to see the overthrow of the Iraqi government and were quite proud of the fact that they had brought briefers from the Iraqi National Congress (INC-Chalabi) to the Senate to make the case to members who were then motivated to push for the act. (See my article “Drinking the Koolaid” for details.)

These same Senate staffers told me with glee, “Now we have Clinton where we want him. He will be forced to take a firm stand against Iraq.” They were correct. The process worked just that way. The same people told me that a major goal of the act was to force Clinton to provide money for the Iraqi resistance to Saddam Hussein.

# 2 (paraphrasing) – “All the major intelligence agencies in the world believed that Saddam’s government had WMDs or active programs for WMDs.”

This is deceptively true. In fact the major intelligence agencies (with few exceptions) have “liaison” relationships to American agencies, and lack the capability to collect the information on which to base independent judgments. All these agencies have an ingrained “inferiority complex” with regard to the capabilities of American intelligence and their leaders generally fear to take positions at variance with American intelligence conclusions because the political leaders of their countries tend to judge their performance by the criterion of their agreement with American Intelligence.

The British are no exception to this rule. “The Secret Intelligence Service” (SIS/MI-6) has largely been a “liaison” service ever since the disaster of the “Cambridge Spies” long ago. SIS is particularly dependent on American liaison. Therefore, it can be said that the fact that the foreign services also “believed” that Saddam had WMDs has no meaning. At the same, critical time, the “International Atomic Energy Agency” (IAEI) was saying that Saddam’s government did not seem to have an atomic program anymore and that the UN inspections were proceeding satisfactorily.

For the record I was head for five or six years of the US end of the military intelligence liaison relationship with one of America’s closest allies.

Col. Patrick W. Lang (Ret.), a highly decorated retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces, served as “Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and was later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. Col. Lang was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. For his service in the DIA, he was awarded the “Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.” He is a frequent commentator on television and radio, including MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (interview), CNN and Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room (interview), PBS’s Newshour, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” (interview), and more .

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“Drinking the Kool-Aid,” Middle East Policy Council Journal, Vol. XI, Summer 2004, No. 2