Leach surprised by missed estimates on Iraq

Congressman Jim Leach says he expected the questions that’re now being raised about whether the Bush Administration exaggerated intelligence data to justify going to war with Iraq.Leach says he’s surprised the U.S. was as “off-base” as it seems to have been about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but Leach says he’s not surprised there was an “over-exaggeration” of the threat Iraq posed. He says, to him, that “always seemed to be the case.” Leach says when he voted last fall against giving President Bush authority to use military force against Iraq he was concerned about U.S. intelligence capabilities. Leach says it’s more difficult for American intelligence to “understand the human heart” — particularly in Muslim countries — than it is to analyze satellite surveillance of weapons systems. Leach says one reason for the exaggerations may have been the experience of the first Bush Administration which found after the Gulf War that Iraq’s nuclear capabilities were greater than intelligence had predicted. On a related note, Leach has introduced legislation which calls on the international community to forgive Iraq’s debts. Leach says having U.S. aid to Iraq used to pay that country’s debts would lead to strange circumstances. Leach says it could lead to U.S. aid being used to pay the French, Germans and Russians for the military hardware they sold Iraq to help in the “propping up of a very corrupt regime.”