Summer 2009 Vol. 10, No. 2

Creative Currents

Duelfer's search for truth and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

In the early pages of his book about the search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, Hide and Seek – The Search for Truth in Iraq (Public Affairs Books), Charles Duelfer ’74 M.A. describes an attack on his convoy while traveling to Baghdad in which two National Guardsmen from Kansas died trying to protect him.

"Knowledge is very expensive. Many Americans and many Iraqis died in this process," says Duelfer, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group, which wrote the 2004 Central Intelligence Agency report that found no WMD after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "What I tried to do is reflect on a personal level what this knowledge cost us. We sent out missions and people died. But it was also expensive for the Iraqis. A lot of what I’m describing in the book was driven by my role because I knew so many Iraqis and I had to explain to them what the U.S. was doing and why."

Duelfer says one of his goals in writing the book was to provide the Iraqi perspective on events because of the differing views Americans and Iraqis had about the effort to topple the Hussein regime.

"The Iraqis saw things quite differently," he says. "I was trying in the book to reflect that and to show the interaction between miscalculation and misperceptions on both sides with the thought that students and future leaders might draw some lessons. Our political leaders elected to use and believe a lot of the assessments on WMD, which were largely wrong. They elected not to believe, or use, a lot of the CIA knowledge and access to the internal political dynamics in Iraq. That turned out, in my opinion, to be the costliest mistake of the last several years."

A former deputy chairman of the United Nations weapons inspection organization (UNSCOM), Duelfer says Saddam felt the United States should have seen Iraq as a friend and natural ally in the turbulent Middle East because Iraq was secular and westward-leaning and had a history of arts and sciences.

"What Saddam failed to understand – and it’s natural he would not understand it – was the political dynamic in Washington," he says. "It was politically impossible in Washington for anyone to have a dialogue with Iraq under his leadership." Duelfer says the common thread of Iraq was shattered when Saddam was taken down because he was the gravity holding together a nation of tribes and religious groups who have competed far more often than cooperated in the preceeding decades and centuries.

"The key for the leadership now in Baghdad is to sustain the organizing principle that people have a stake in the country," he says. "If the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is able to convince those separate groups – Sunni, Shia and Kurds – that they have a stake in a unified country, I think they’ll muddle through and evolve a system that they all will participate in. I have enough faith in the Iraqis – no matter what their tribe or religious group – that they will sort themselves out. During my time with many Iraqis under Saddam, people didn’t think of themselves a Sunni or Shia first; that only happened after Saddam. They thought of themselves as Iraqi. I think they will return to that path."

— Kenneth Best

Charles Duelfer Audio Clips