WASHINGTON, 27 June 2003 — Gen. John Abizaid, the incoming commander of US forces in Iraq, told Senators on Wednesday he is confident that stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an illicit program to build nuclear arms will be uncovered in Iraq, but a critic was quick to point out the “double standards” used to justify the war.
“I believe that as we get on with the mission of continuing to look for weapons of mass destruction and piece together the story evidence that is available with the country... we’ll piece together the story that tells us what happened to the weapons of mass destruction somewhere between 1998 and 2003,” Abizaid said at a Senate hearing on his nomination to be chief of the US Central Command.
US forces, he said, had expected to intercept Iraq’s chemical or biological arms before they were transferred from storage depots to becoming weapons. “But we’ve looked at the depots, and they’re not there,” Gen. Abizaid said, adding the possibility they had been moved, hidden or destroyed.
Abizaid, an American of Lebanese descent who speaks Arabic, said the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a surprise, as US intelligence agencies had been convincing regarding their existence. “The evidence was so pervasive.”
And it was this information, he said, that had caused US officers to expect Iraqi forces to use biological or chemical weapons against advancing US and British troops “early in the campaign.”
A critic was quick to point out the “double standards” used as rational for launching the war in Iraq.
“This obviously means the US has been overly exaggerating and perhaps even manufacturing some data to try to convince the rest of the world that there were weapons of mass destruction, since that was a key dimension in the justification for this war,” said Samih Farsoun, professor of sociology at American University.
“And it was obviously overplayed by the US in its effort to justify war against Iraq.”
