America's Credibility Is Taking A Hit In Iraq

Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the nation and the world when President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others so confidently suggested, as their casus belli, that Saddam Hussein had hundreds of tons of banned chemical and biological weapons and a program to build a nuclear bomb?

What if Saddam destroyed most, or all, of his weapons of mass destruction years ago?

That suspicion is taking root in much of the world. I think it is wrong. But I also fear that the administration may have done grave damage to its own credibility abroad by overstating the quality of its intelligence and creating an expectation that it would find large arsenals of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq -- an expectation that officials are no longer confident they can fulfill.

Unless we find such arsenals, or solid proof that Saddam had them until recently, people may be hard to convince that the administration is not crying wolf the next time it accuses a rogue nation of developing doomsday weapons.

To be sure, some suggest that Bush "doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue)," in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, because ending Saddam's bloody tyranny was ample justification for the war.

This sort of logic may be good enough for the American electorate, at least for now. But it should not be. As Republicans used to stress, the president of the United States should tell the truth. Especially when he is beating war drums, and when the credibility of the nation is at stake.

Bush sold this war as pre-emptive self-defense against the threat posed by Saddam's chemical and biological weapons (and quest for nuclear weapons), not as a precaution against future production of chemical and biological weapons. Before the invasion, he spoke of liberating the Iraqi people as a happy side effect of war, not as a necessary or sufficient reason for it. He assured the United Nations that if Saddam disarmed, the U.S. would not disturb his brutal tyranny.

At this writing, no chemical or biological weapons have turned up in Iraq, to the apparent surprise and chagrin of high-level administration officials. No mustard gas. No VX. No anthrax. Not one vial.

U.S. investigators have found what they believe to be one or more mobile biological weapons laboratories -- a potential semi-smoking gun, in the view of one well-placed official. They have also found protective suits and atropine to ward off chemical weapons, and materials that could be used to make chemical weapons. But it remains to be seen whether the mobile labs could have had benign purposes and the protective equipment could have been intended for defensive use.

On May 13, Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division in northern Iraq, told reporters: "There's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago," but "I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago," or "destroyed right before the war," or "whether they're still hidden" (emphasis added).

This is not what one would have expected after pre-war statements such as Bush's March 17 assertion to the nation that "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Or such as portions of Colin Powell's February 5 speech to the U.N.: "This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well documented.... Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.... Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons.... And we have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them."

Now, by contrast, the official line about weapons of mass destruction seems to be morphing from 1) unqualified assertions that "we will find them," as Bush told NBC's Tom Brokaw on April 24; to 2) suggestions that Saddam may have quickly destroyed WMD or shipped them off to Syria in recent months to avoid detection by U.N. inspectors; to 3) speculations that perhaps Saddam had ended the deployment of large stocks of difficult-to-maintain WMD years ago, choosing instead to build mobile labs and the like to give himself the capability of making WMD whenever he chose.

The first theory may prove to be true, but it looks increasingly forlorn in the context of statements such as those by Gen. Petraeus.

The second theory improbably posits that after spending billions on WMD, Saddam decided, under threat of invasion and death, to get rid of them clandestinely rather than trying to save himself by either surrendering them publicly or using them to stop the invaders. This theory is also hard to square with the pre-war administration claims that WMD had been deployed to Iraqi units. (If so, why didn't coalition troops find any of them after overrunning those units?) And it would tend to support the anti-war mantra that the U.N. inspections could contain any Iraqi threat. Besides, if indeed Saddam did send his WMD abroad, the Bush policy may have exacerbated the proliferation that it was supposed to prevent.

The third theory may be the most plausible. But if Saddam did get rid of his WMD years ago, it means that Hans Blix was right to accuse the administration of relying on "shaky" intelligence; that U.S. officials misled the world, negligently albeit not deliberately; and that Bush miscalculated Saddam's intentions as badly as Saddam miscalculated Bush's.

This does not mean that Saddam was not a threat. Three pillars of the administration's WMD case are clearly true: U.N. inspectors found vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear program in Iraq during the 1990s; lots of the weapons had not been destroyed before those inspectors were forced out of the country; and those weapons remain unaccounted for to this day, because Saddam contemptuously spurned many chances to show the U.N. any documentation of their destruction.

The administration assumed, logically enough, that Saddam had kept these weapons. After all, if he had destroyed them, wouldn't he have proved it to the world rather than seeing his country suffer through years of devastating U.N. economic sanctions and exposing himself unnecessarily to invasion and death?

Perhaps not, theorizes David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations and has close ties to the current administration. Perhaps Saddam got rid of his weapons (but not his development programs) to make sure that U.N. inspectors did not stumble across them, but hoped that -- by bluffing that he still had them -- he could continue to intimidate his neighbors and could deter Bush from marching into Baghdad. Perhaps he assumed that the surest way to invite an invasion would be to show Bush how defenseless he was.

And once the world's attention had turned elsewhere, Rivkin's theory suggests, Saddam could have used his blueprints to develop new chemical, biological, and, ultimately, nuclear weapons: "What mattered the most, and provided the most compelling strategic justification for the regime change, was Saddam's unshakable commitment to retain, on a long-term basis, a viable WMD effort."

Rivkin may be right. But Seymour M. Hersh may also be right in contending (in the May 12 New Yorker) that the administration gave undue credence to ideology-driven intelligence analyses prepared by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. That unit was set up in late 2001 by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz because Pentagon hawks were dissatisfied with the reluctance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to support their claims that Iraq was both awash in banned weapons and allied with Al Qaeda. These analysts, claims Hersh, persuaded the White House to trust Iraqi defectors of questionable veracity and to brush aside evidence inconsistent with their speculations and hawkish assumptions.

In a speech last October, for example, Bush made much of Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and weapons chief, whose defection to Jordan in 1995 forced Saddam's regime "to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents." But Bush and other officials have ignored Kamel's statements to U.N. interviewers that all of these weapons had been produced before the 1991 Gulf War and destroyed during the early 1990s. (Kamel was killed after being lured back to Iraq with his family in 1996.)

If the world ends up concluding that Saddam did destroy most or all of his WMD years ago, both the president's credibility and America's security will have suffered a serious self-inflicted wound.

I agree with your #4, destroyed shortly before the war. Except for nuclear, WMD have no value unless they are decisive. If you only inconvenience an enemy, who is prepared, you just make the whole war uncomfortable for everyone including yourself.

By developing the technology you only "cook" the goodies before you need to use them, since they go a long way against unprotected civilians or for intimidation of neighbors (if that's all you need). Besides, once prepared, the facilities required to hold the "entre" ready is too complex and detectable by inspectors. They only needed to develop the technology, not the product.

But it remains to be seen whether the mobile labs could have had benign purposes and the protective equipment could have been intended for defensive use.

If a machine does not have gasoline in its tank, it's NOT A CAR?

The only risk to Bush is that the Democrats will use Saddam's tactic to claim that, "There was no urgency to go to war and inspections were working." Of course, that way, inspections would never have have found anything and Saddam could keep developing the technology. . . like a fox.

Ahhh, yes. Stuart Taylor, Jr. The "noted" writer of truth, the talking head coveted by the alphabet-networks because he changes sides and/or positions as often as Hillary changes incontinent napkins.

I offer this article dated 4-28-2003 and titled "The U.N. Is Often Grotesque, but We Need Its Help" as proof that what you've just read is nothing but "puppy-peepee training absorbent" by a switch-hitting legal eagle who bats rightie or leftie depending on audience expectations.

A short sample of the article ". . . some U.N. critics draw a dangerous conclusion: that, in the words of columnist Charles Krauthammer, the United States should "just ignore" the U.N., should keep it out of Iraq, and should let it "wither away." The administration has not said that, but has taken an unwisely uncompromising approach, at least in its efforts to freeze Hans Blix and his team of U.N. inspectors out of the so-far-strikingly-fruitless hunt for banned weapons in Iraq. The exclusion of these independent inspectors is widely seen around the globe, especially in the Arab world, as designed to facilitate the planting of chemical or biological agents or other phony evidence. While administration officials dismiss such suspicions as preposterous, much of the world does not.

"The Bush approach strikes Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, as "needlessly antagonistic and horrifically short-sighted in terms of our own objectives." I agree. Adds Slaughter in an interview, "We have created a situation in which it is so politically popular to oppose us that we are generating new adversaries for ourselves. If we were willing to work through the U.N., we could accomplish all the same objectives with virtually all the same people but with a completely different profile—in terms of [showing that] it's not about oil, it's not about U.S. imperialism, it's not about Israel, it's a global effort to find weapons of mass destruction and provide for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.""

With all due respect to Mr. Taylor, and he deserves very little with the way he flops around like a freshly-landed mackerel on a scorching hot dock, he's full of cacca.

The existence of a clear and present danger, not some murky "potential" to build WMD was always the leading argument for war at least against anti-war freepers like me.

No sir. The issue for me has always been Saddam's underlying capacity to develop (or acquire) and use WMDs, either directly or through terrorists. Moreover, we have the same right to take out other rogue nations as well (e.g. Iran, Syria) for the same reasons, including by means of military force if necessary. Bush explained all this in his September 20, 2001 speech to Congress, which set forth the Bush Doctrine. Note here that we also took out the Taliban with extreme prejudice, even though -- unlike the case with Saddam -- no one seriously contended that the Taliban possessed or was developing WMDs of its own.

One great advantage of being the world's only superpower is that in this post 9/11 world we need not tolerate any threats (both ambiguous and unambiguous) against our own national security. Both Saddam and the Taliban are cases in point. The terrorists, and the governments who support them, never should have started this war against us.

What if Saddam destroyed most, or all, of his weapons of mass destruction years ago?

Funny thing.
That's all that the UN resolution was expecting of him.

And allowing verification and review of the destruction documentation would have made this discussion academic.

Are the stupid pills people like this author must take available without a prescription?

Well put. I would add only that this type of claim is so September 10. On September 10, 2001 there was also no urgency to go to war with the Taliban. Indeed, there was even less urgency with the Taliban than with Saddam, because at least the Taliban was not actively developing or using WMDs on its own. By the end of the next day, this approach blew up in our faces -- literally. When an enemy is seeking to arm (or otherwise support or harbor) terrorists who want to use WMDs against us, time is not on our side. You have to take them out before they take you out.

We philosophically disagree. I believe we should be a defense oriented Republic not a Wilsonian empire....but that is another issue.

I never denied that some freepers, like you, emphasized other arguments, such as "capacity" but those freepers were in the minority. The main argument for war both on FR and as sold by the administration was a hysterical clear and present danger argument. Americans, of course, were sold a bill of goods just like when Clinton claimed that 100,000 had been murdered in Kosovo. Same old, same old.

Excuses, excuses, excuses! History will not look kindly on an administration that did not know whether there were WMD's. Whether there was intentional lying or distortion to lead the people to war will come out in the future. Either way, incompetence or lying will not be a valid excuse for the killing and destruction. War is a serious matter as we should have learned in previous wars.

In defense of country, war is entirely justified. False pretenses or ignorance are not jusification. When war is sought, a person should be held to truth, not manipulation. We support our troops to be engaged in a meaningful matter based on the truth and defense of country. We don't expect them to die in a conflict engineered by someone's active imagination.

We philosophically disagree. I believe we should be a defense oriented Republic not a Wilsonian empire....but that is another issue.

No, it's the same issue. What we did in Iraq and Afghanistan was proactive self-defense. In this age of WMDs and post 9/11, you can no longer wait for the enemy to hit you where you live before responding. Sometimes you must hit him first before he hits you. If he wants to live, he should stop threatening us, stop calling for jihads against us, stop engaging in acts of terrorism against us or our allies, stop supporting such acts of terrorism by others, and stop trying to develop or acquire WMDs so that he can use them (or threaten to use them) against us or our allies. If he doesn't want to live, well that's his problem -- we who do are merely granting him his wish.

Bottom line is that Saddam even admitted to having WMD's he just said they were all destroyed but for some strange reason he wouldn't let the UN verify it. I wonder why? Those of you trying to say there were no WMDs in Iraq must not believe your lying eyes. The only question that was left to be answered was did he destroy them or not. You say he did and President Bush says he didn't. Who should I believe? Worst case to me is he destroyed them just prior to the invasion. If this is the case then the invasion is justified. If we find even ONE WMD then this invasion is justified. If we find credible evidence he had an operational WMD production capacity then this invasion is justified.

There is not a single shred of evidence that anyone lied about or misrepresented the WMD threat prior to the war. To the contrary, every nation on the UN Security Counsel -- including France, Germany, and Russia -- agreed that the threat existed. The disagreement was what to do about the threat. Saddam's continued refusals to cooperate fully and proactively with UN inspectors only exacerbated the concern that he had these weapons and was hiding them. Had he destroyed them years ago, as you apparently now claim, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to say so at the time and in the manner that Resolution 1441 presecribed.

It is still too soon to say that we won't find any WMDs, which in all likelihood were either destroyed or very well hidden just before the start of the war -- in both cases, you cannot destroy or hide what you weren't even supposed to have in the first place. It isn't too early to say, however, that we have destroyed the capacity of his government (directly or through terrorists) to use such weapons against us. That's a very good thing.

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