Central Intelligence Agency Analysis

However reports from the UN weapons inspections challenged the Bush administration’s reasoning for authorizing war, as they found no evidence of Iraq reviving their nuclear program (Nungesser 2004, 216). The Bush administration's argument for authorizing war in Iraq was also not viewed as rational and was vocally opposed by several nations. Although they had the support of Great Britain and seven other European Union members, the European Parliament stated that the breaches made by Iraq of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1441 did not justify the need for military action (Frankel and Richburg 2003, A16). Because of this opposition a resolution for military action against Iraq was not going to be passed by the UNSC, therefore

Normally the CIA’s organizational culture and procedures prioritized data collection by separating the collection and analysis of raw intelligence from the political process of policy making. However, the strong assumption of Iraq obtaining and growing their WMD supply tainted this process and the conclusions that came from it. There seemed to be a move away from the CIA’s routine intelligence process of collecting information, evaluating its credibility, and then combining it with other information in order to understand how it affected U.S. interests (Pillar 2006, 16). The Bush administration then used intelligence not to inform decision-making, but rather to justify a decision that was already made (Pillar 2006, 18). Robert Jervis argues that Bush’s doctrine of preventive war in Iraq asked more of the intelligence community than was possible, leading to massive intelligence failures concerning WMDs from a combination of both faulty intelligence and the distortion of information by the Bush administration (2006, 173). The politicisation of intelligence was apparent in multiple forms. Decision-makers made inaccurate public statements, especially Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld whose claims implied the existence of evidence which contradicted the CIA’s findings (Jervis 2006, 173). Notable examples of these claims were the President claiming that Saddam was seeking uranium from Africa and the Vice-President and Secretary of Defence claiming connections between Iraq and al Qaeda and that a WMD threat was imminent (Jervis 2006, 174). Another form of politicisation was the influence of pressure on the CIA to bolster their findings to justify conclusions that policy-makers had already determined. This pressure from