Walking back the cat

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First in a three-part series.

Time to walk back the cat -- except this is a tiger of a subject with a very long tail. "Walk back the cat" is spy slang for retracing the train of evidence and assumptions until the double agent, the false source or the analytic error is identified. The cat unraveled the ball of string. Rewind the twisted yarn to find the flaw.

The objective is correcting mistakes so they don't happen again. After a fault-ridden story runs, newspapers review their fact-checking process. It's painful, but credibility matters. Intelligence failures, however, exact a more heinous price. Pearl Harbor and September 11. 2001, illustrate the costs of intelligence debacles.

This column starts a three-part series on Western intel assessments regarding America's long war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And I mean long. Thirteen years is the proper metric for the Saddam War, which began on Aug. 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Iraq's attack on Kuwait surprised the United States. It was an intel flop based on the assumption Saddam was bluffing. Iraq had pulled the trick before, putting troops on Kuwait's border. Short hours before the Iraqis moved, the "he's bluffing" assumption held sway. Then Iraqi military radio traffic spiked and Saddam's tanks rolled.

Walk back -- Kuwait showed Saddam didn't always bluff, even if he risked war with America.

Israel's June 1981 air attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor isn't the first "cat track" regarding Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs. Iran suspected Saddam might seek nukes.

After concluding Saddam was building the bomb, Israel destroyed Osirak. It received global condemnation for its pre-emptive attack. However, the Middle East, from Riyadh to the ayatollahs' Tehran, was relieved. In 1981, Iraq's neighbors knew if Saddam had a nuke, he would use it.

Track to 1984. ABC News documented Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. Iran claimed 80,000 chemical casualties from mustard gas, and possibly nerve gas. Saddam didn't bluff when it came to using chemicals against enemies.