MIAMI, 8 October 2004 — Vice President Dick Cheney asserted yesterday that a report by the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, who found no evidence that Iraq produced weapons of mass destruction after 1991, justifies rather than undermines President Bush’s decision to go to war.
The report shows that “delay, defer, wasn’t an option,” Cheney told a town-hall style meeting.
While Democrats seized on the new report by Charles Duelfer to bolster their case that invading Iraq was a mistake, Cheney focused on portions of the report that were more favorable to the administration’s case.
Although it says Saddam’s weapons program had deteriorated since the 1991 Gulf War and did not pose a threat to the world in 2003, the report also says that Saddam’s main goal was to get international sanctions lifted.
“As soon as the sanctions were lifted he had every intention of going back” to his weapons program, Cheney said.
Cheney said the report also concluded that the United Nations’ “Fuel for Food” program “was totally corrupted by Saddam Hussein. There were suggestions employees of the United Nations were part of the scheme as well.”
“The suggestion is clearly there by Mr. Duelfer that Saddam had used the program in such a way that he had bought off foreign governments and was building support among them to take the sanctions down,” Cheney said.
That being the case, there was no reason to wait to invade Iraq to give inspectors more time to do their work, Cheney said.
On Wednesday, the former head of the UN weapons inspection team, Hans Blix, said: “Had we had a few months more (of inspections before the war), 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.”
Duelfer’s report said what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.
The report of the weapons hunter was presented Wednesday to senators and the public in the midst of a fierce presidential election campaign in which Iraq and the war of terror have become the overriding issues.
