WASHINGTON, 16 June 2003 — Last October in Cincinnati, President Bush delivered what could stand as the most concise summary of why the United States might go to war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s regime, he said, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.’’
Today, more than a month after Bush declared that the United States and its allies had “prevailed’’ in the war against Saddam, there still is no consensus over whether the threat was as great as described.
A careful review of the evidence marshaled by the Bush administration and that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the months leading up to the war suggests that some of the claims were overstated, others have been proven wrong, and still others — particularly those involving Saddam’s human rights abuses against his own people — have been amply validated.
But the charges that many found the most troubling, those involving Saddam’s alleged production of chemical and biological weapons, remain largely unsupported. As a rule, the more specific the claim, the more likely it is to have been to be debunked, or at least called into question. Factories named by the administration have been inspected and found clean; evidence that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from an African country was found to be based on a forgery.
Since the war, the administration has subtly shifted its rhetoric against Saddam’s fallen government, with Bush even moving away from the claim — made repeatedly and vehemently — that Iraq was actively producing and stockpiling chemical and biological weapons, saying instead that it “had a weapons program.’’
The failure of the United States and its allies to come up with undisputed proof that Iraq was a storehouse of dangerous, illegal weapons has become political fodder for opponents of Bush, Blair and even Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose government also supplied troops for the conflict. In this country, some Democrats in Congress have called for an investigation of the intelligence that underpinned the administration’s drive to war. Senior Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have continued to predict that they will be vindicated and have counseled patience while teams of weapons hunters scour Iraq.
But there also has been an effort to downplay the issue, with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz noting in a recent interview in Vanity Fair magazine that the administration had stressed unconventional weapons before the war “for bureaucratic reasons,’’ when in fact they were just one of several reasons to attack Iraq.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week, a senior administration official spoke of “connecting the dots’’ and uncovering weapons programs, but repeatedly stopped short of saying any weapons would be found.
“I believe we will put together a picture that will be quite specific,’’ the official said. “But let me ask you something: Is a capacity to put together precursors into a chemical weapon simply a program? Or is that a weapon?’’ The charges against Iraq predate the current administration. Well after Bush’s father, the first President Bush, went to war against Iraq in 1991, President Clinton accused Saddam of thwarting UN inspections so Iraq could continue to build chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Clinton ordered US forces to bomb Iraq in December 1998 after declaring that Saddam not only possessed unconventional weapons, but “has used them — not once, but repeatedly I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons again.’’ Operation Desert Fox lasted four days and hit nearly 100 targets, including suspected chemical or biological weapons sites.
The current Bush administration began escalating its rhetoric about Iraq not long after the Sept. 11 attacks. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush included Saddam’s regime in an “Axis of Evil’’ with Iran and North Korea.
