WMD Intelligence Analysis of Lessons from Iraq to Iran Only Dot the I's - Don't Cross the T's
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Authors
Segell, Glen
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Date of Issue
2010-04-01
Date
4/1/2010
Publisher
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Program for Culture and Conflict Studies
Program for Culture and Conflict Studies
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Abstract
"Blair's evidence shows that there will be many evaluations on how and why politicians made a decision to go to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This article will do so by piecing together Blair's evidence to show how defense and security decision makers erroneously relied too heavily on an open source narrative. The problem of this narrative arose because over a period of 12 years from Operation Desert Storm (1991) the press quoted politicians, generals, scientists and experts who then quoted the press who then quoted politicians, generals, scientists and experts. In doing so a narrative was constructed about Iraqi WMD that bore little resemblance to reality in 2003 on the eve of war. This was despite each fact of the narrative being accurate in its own right at the time it was first reported. The problem as will be shown in this article is that this new and exaggerated narrative emerged from the sum of many narratives creating the false impression that Iraq had WMD in 2003. This false narrative lacked a coherent or accurate time-scale. This false narrative was time-compressed giving the impression that the contents referred to a period of weeks when in fact they referred to a period of many years. Inherently any security analysis of the false narrative was doomed to be inaccurate."
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This article was published in Culture and Conflict Review (Spring 2010), v.4 no.1
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Culture and Conflict Review (Spring 2010), v.4 no.1
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.