Counterterrorism Blog

The New York Times has published a remarkable piece on October 27 suggesting that satellite imagery which is now available commercially showed the construction of a nuclear facility in Syria that was well-developed as early as the summer of 2003, and which had been initiated as early as 2001.

In the measured prose of the Times, the informnation "is likely to raise questions about whether the Bush administration overlooked a nascent atomic threat in Syria while planning and executing a war in Iraq, which was later found to have no active nuclear program."

The issue of whether the U.S. invaded the wrong country has lately been focused on suggestions that the real nuclear threat in 2003 and now, has been Iran, not Iraq, an issue highlighted by the increasing focus of the Administration on Iran. There is little doubt that Iran is a serious proliferation threat and reportedly the Administration is considering a "surgical strike" on suspect Iranian WMD facilities, notwithstanding European concerns about Iranian military retaliation, perhaps first in Europe and Latin America.

But if in fact Syria was well along the way to constructing its own nuclear facility, and this reality was actually missed by senior U.S. policy-makers, the apparent failure to recognize this and respond to it years ago is to say the least, disturbing.

The satellite imagery and initial comments suggest that the U.S. simply failed to notice Syria's WMD program, a kind of nuclear negligence. One would hope that there is a different story behind the public facts.

Public hints about the Syrian program by U.S. government officials go back to 2003, appearing amid a fight between then Under Secretary of State John Bolton and intelligence analysts regarding Mr. Bolton's contention that Syria was actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, which the CIA reportedly viewed to be "inflated." The now available satellite imagery raises the question of whether Mr. Bolton may have been right on this issue, without making it clear whether his views were related to knowledge about the existence of the now-eradicated Syrian site.

We need to know more -- a lot more -- about Syria's apparent nuclear program, our intelligence on the program, the U.S. government's handling of that intelligence since 2001, the circumstances that led to the Israeli bombing of the site, and the relationship of any Syrian nuclear program not only to North Korea's program but to the AQ Khan network. Previously, it had been assumed that while Khan had had contacts with Syria, they were preliminary and had not resulted in substantive activities. Failure by Pakistan to provide the U.S. information on any such relationship would raise further questions about the accuracy of State Department public assessments that Pakistani cooperation with the U.S. in addressing the global security consequences of Khan's activities has been "good."