JERUSALEM — A former senior Israeli military intelligence official asserted Thursday that the nation's spy agencies were a "full partner" to the United States and Britain in producing flawed prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to mount attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
The sharply worded report by Shlomo Brom, a brigadier general in the army reserves, prompted one lawmaker to call for an independent inquiry into the performance of Israeli intelligence before the start of hostilities in Iraq.
Until now, the role of Israeli intelligence agencies in assessing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime -- and the subsequent failure so far by coalition investigators to find evidence of a chemical and biological weapons program that was an imminent threat -- has been the subject of little public debate here.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair has been hounded by domestic critics who say prewar intelligence on Hussein's weapons program was either flawed or exaggerated -- or both -- in order to support President Bush's decision to go to war.
Bush also has faced criticism over the lack of proof that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, though the U.S. president has not been forced to expend nearly as much political capital as Blair in fending off contentions that the threat was deliberately distorted.
Brom, a senior researcher at one of Israel's leading think tanks, the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said intelligence produced by Israel played a significant role in augmenting the case for toppling Hussein.
"In the questioning of the picture painted by coalition intelligence, the third party in this intelligence failure -- Israel -- has remained in the shadows," he wrote. "And yet, Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq's nonconventional capabilities."
The Israeli intelligence agencies, Brom said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons existed."
Brom attributed the failure to professional lapses and misreading of important data, coupled with what he called a "one-dimensional perception" of Hussein by Israel's intelligence-gathering agencies.
