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From The Independent:
Israel accused over dud Saddam reports
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
06 December 2003
Israel was a "full partner" in the intelligence failures that led to the conclusion that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion, according to a report by an
Israeli think-tank.
The findings will re-ignite the speculation over whether Israel was the "third country" that
supplied intelligence used in Tony Blair's Iraq dossier, claiming Iraq had tried to get
"significant quantities of uranium from Africa".
The report, by a former deputy director of the Israeli military's planning division, said the
demand in the UK and the US for an investigation into how intelligence agencies concluded that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction "forgets there was a third senior partner to the
assessment -- and that third partner was Israel".
The report said: "Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by US and
British intelligence about Iraq's non-conventional capabilities ... [and] the failures in the war
in Iraq point to inherent failures and weaknesses of Israeli intelligence and decision makers." It
accuses Israel of producing "an exaggerated assessment of Iraqi capabilities," and raises "the
possibility that the intelligence picture was manipulated".
The report, written by Brigadier-General Shlomo Brun for the Jaffee Center for Strategic
Studies, has caused controversy in Israel. But in Britain it may fuel speculation surrounding the
dossier published by Mr Blair to justify the war.
US intelligence agencies had discounted the claim about African uranium due to insufficient
evidence. The UK Government defended its inclusion, saying it had access to information from an
unnamed "third country", which US intelligence had not seen.
In Israel, an opposition MP, Yossi Sarid, has demanded an enquiry into Israel's intelligence
failures before the invasion, in the light of the report's conclusions.
The report said: "A critical question to be answered is whether governmental bodies falsely
manipulated the intelligence information in order to gain support for their decision to go to war
in Iraq, while the real reasons for this decision were obfuscated or concealed."
Brigadier-General Brun said Israel's defence establishment "did not spare any cost to deal
with non-existent threats or threats with zero possibility of actualization". Israeli intelligence
was "taken over by a mono-dimensional view of Saddam that fundamentally described him as the
embodiment of evil, a man in the grip of an obsession to develop weapons of mass destruction to
harm Israel and others ... There was absolute indifference to the complexity of considerations that
a leader like Saddam Hussein must have."
Survival was Saddam's main concern, and "such an assessment should have led to the conclusion
that after 1991 developing weapons of mass destruction could become threatening to his survival."
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