WASHINGTON, 8 October 2004 — One by one, official reports by government investigators, statements by former administration officials and internal CIA analyses have combined to undermine many of the central rationales of the administration’s case for war with Iraq — and its handling of the post-invasion occupation.
The release of Wednesday’s definitive account on Iraq’s weapons — and its conclusion that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction years before the US-led invasion — is only the latest in a series of damaging blows to the White House’s strategy of portraying the war in Iraq as being on the cusp of success. The report also comes just a few weeks after Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John F. Kerry gave new life to his campaign by emphasizing what he claims is the gap between the president’s rhetoric and realities in Iraq.
Earlier this week, President Bush’s former administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, broke with the administration to say officials had sent too few troops to Iraq and allowed a culture of lawlessness to develop. The CIA, using information gathered after the invasion, last week cast doubt on whether Saddam Hussein aided Abu Musab Zarqawi, an Al-Qaeda associate, as the administration repeatedly alleged before the war.
The CIA over the summer delivered an analysis that in the best-case scenario, Iraq could be expected to achieve a “tenuous stability” over the next 18 months and in the worst case could dissolve into civil war. The July assessment was similar to one produced before the war and another in late 2003 that also were more pessimistic in tone than the administration’s portrayal of the resistance to the US occupation.
The risk for the Bush campaign is that the drip-drip of the revelations will slowly erode the advantage the president has held among voters for his handling of the Iraq war and especially the war on terrorism. Despite growing misgivings about the violence in Iraq, Bush has held a commanding lead on whether he would better handle the battle against terrorists.
But in the first two candidates’ debates, Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, have worked to separate the two issues. They have charged that Bush bungled the war on terror — especially against Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who is still at large — through what they have described as a needless diversion into Iraq.
Kerry has had his own problems on Iraq: He accepted that the administration intelligence on Iraq was correct, and voted to authorize the use of force. But he has said he gave Bush that authorization in order to give him credibility in the showdown with Iraq, and that he would have given the UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.
While Bush said Wednesday that Saddam “chose defiance and war, (and) our coalition enforced the just demands of the world,’’ Iraq actually had allowed the UN to send inspectors into the country, though Iraqi officials had balked at allowing scientists to leave the country for questioning. The inspectors left not because Iraq kicked them out, but because the United States said it was about to launch an invasion and their safety could not be guaranteed.
Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, adding weight to Kerry’s argument, said Wednesday, “Had we had a few months more, we would have been able to tell both the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction (at) all the sites that they had given to us.’’
Kerry campaign officials jumped on the report, saying it was one more piece of evidence that the war in Iraq was mistake and based on evidence that was either faulty or exaggerated by administration officials. Susan Rice, a senior foreign policy adviser to Kerry, said the Bush campaign is “grasping at straws’’ as it strains to maintain a link between the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq.
Rice said the White House had made a “very dangerous strategic error’’ by focusing on Iraq, which turns out to have no weapons, while ignoring or mishandling the much more dangerous threats posed by Iran and North Korea, countries known to have active nuclear programs.
Administration officials have responded to the report by playing down the failure to find weapons, suggesting it was old news. Bush, in fact, ignored the findings when he gave a major speech attacking Kerry, saying that “there was a risk — a real risk — that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons, or material, or information to terrorist networks.’’
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, interviewed on the BBC, stressed Wednesday that the report found that Saddam had a missile program in violation of UN Security Council resolutions and that he had the “capability and the intention’’ to possess dangerous weapons. “He did not, apparently, have WMD. That’s clear,’’ Armitage said, adding, “I think all of us have addressed this.’’
Indeed, administration officials spent Wednesday trying to refocus the attention of reporters on the disclosures in the report that many US allies, top foreign officials and major international figures secretly helped Saddam generate more than $11 billion in illegal income in violation of UN sanctions. The report contains a long list of foreign officials and companies involved in helping Iraq — while the names of Americans were blacked out because of privacy considerations.
With Kerry making an ability to work with allies a central plank of his foreign policy agenda, the revelations of allied deceit could undercut that argument in the minds of voters. Wednesday on the campaign trail, Bush declared, “I’ll never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.’’
Rice argued there was different lesson from the report — that the sanctions regime had prevented Saddam from acquiring weapons and greatly weakened him. The United States, as a permanent member of the Security Council, could forever veto any attempt to lift the sanctions, she said. “What this means is that the sanctions had him in a box, and he couldn’t have gotten out of the box unless the administration lifted him out of it,’’ she said.
