Who needs WMD when you’ve got Saddam?
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Dec. 18 (IPS)— With former
president Saddam Hussein in the bag, the administration of President
George W. Bush appears determined to make US voters forget Washington
invaded Iraq on the pretext that its apparently non-existent weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) posed a direct threat to the United States
and its allies.
The effort so far has taken two forms: the suggestion by administration
officials, including Bush himself, that ousting and capturing Saddam
were ample justifications for going to war; and the quiet dissolution
of the nearly billion-dollar effort to find WMD in Iraq.
In a nationally televised interview earlier this week, Bush appeared
to dismiss the relevance of whether Iraq actually had WMD and the possibility
that Saddam might eventually move to acquire them.
“So what’s the difference?’’ asked Bush, who later
added that he was persuaded Saddam constituted “a gathering threat,
after 9/11...that needed to be dealt with.’’
“And so we got rid of him, and there’s no doubt the world
is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam being gone,’’
he went on.
At the same time, the reported decision by David Kay, director of the
Iraq Survey Group (ISG), to step down as early as next month appeared
to confirm that US intelligence agencies have concluded there are no
WMD to be found in Iraq.
Indeed, the timing of the still-unconfirmed report by the Washington
Post about Kay’s decision — while the US media are still celebrating
Saddam’s capture — suggests the administration wants to wind
down the effort while US lawmakers, who have been pressing for evidence
of a WMD threat, are out of session and thus less able to ask embarrassing
questions about what the president knew and when.
“In my many years on [Capitol Hill]’’, one veteran congressional
staffer told IPS: “I don’t know that I’ve seen anything
quite as cynical as this. They’re clearly hoping that Congress
and the American public will just forget that they waged war because
of a threat that never existed but that they hyped to kingdom come.’’
Several analysts said they believed Kay’s decision, which was reportedly
communicated to White House officials and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), which oversees the 1,400-member ISG, was an implicit admission
by the former UN inspector — who had called for Saddam’s ouster
as early as the mid-1990s — that he did not believe WMD would be
found.
“The departure of Kay, who supported the administration’s
pre-war WMD claims, is an indicator that the he does not expect to unearth
any of the weapons of mass destruction that had previously been cited
by the administration as a threat that required US intervention,’’
said Charles Pena, head of defense studies at the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank.
He and others said Kay’s departure should renew questions about
the basis for the administration’s pre-war claims, the subject
already of investigations by congressional intelligence committees that,
however, will not reconvene until mid-January.
When the administration began seriously gearing up for war against Iraq
some 16 months ago, it argued that the threats posed by Baghdad were
essentially two-fold: that the regime had failed to dismantle and destroy
large stocks of WMD and the missiles to deliver them; and that it had
operational links with al-Qaida and other terrorist groups that were
already, in effect, waging war against the United States.
While Washington’s claims about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles were
largely accepted — many of the same claims were made by the former
Clinton administration, a point that Bush officials have been making
with increasing defensiveness over the past several months — Saddam’s
links to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida met with skepticism on the
part of counter-terrorism experts and virtually all of Washington’s
foreign allies.
Although Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, never entirely
dropped charges of a Baghdad-bin Laden link, they stressed the WMD threat
increasingly in the run-up to the war.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld even declared to reporters Mar. 30, 10
days into the invasion, “We know where [the WMD] are. They’re
in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north
somewhat’’.
Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice were particularly
insistent that Saddam was well on the way to building a nuclear device,
a point suggested in a passage in Bush’s January 2003 State of
the Union Address, when he charged that Iraq had bought many tons of
uranium “yellowcake’’ from an African country, later
identified as Niger.
But the pre-war hype began to fall apart once US troops secured most
of Iraq, including the area described by Rumsfeld, and rounded up key
scientists alleged to have worked on WMD programs in the past.
In July, former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had gone to Niger at
the CIA’s behest to check out the yellowcake story in early 2002,
charged that the administration, particularly Cheney’s office,
must have known the charge was bogus.
At the same time, Kay, who had long charged Saddam with holding vast
supplies of WMD, was hired by the CIA to head a massive, nearly billion-dollar,
inter-agency effort to find the goods.
Kay filed an initial report in early October that conceded not only
that no weapons had been found, but also that Iraq showed no traces
of a chemical weapons program since 1991. But he stressed that the ISG
had found ‘’laboratories’’ that could be used to
develop WMD.
But administration officials appeared already to be distancing themselves
from the importance of Kay’s work, and in the following months
as resistance to the US-led occupation intensified, hundreds of ISG
members were redeployed to the counter-insurgency effort.
“I think David Kay is at the end of his tether and that if he thought
there was a job to be done, he would stay and do it,’’ Scott
Ritter, a former UN arms inspector, told IPS.
“I think the CIA and the White House have concluded that there
are no WMD to be found and that Kay’s continued presence is itself
a distraction,’’ added Ritter, who was among the very few
experts who argued before the war that Bush’s WMD claims were not
credible.
Imad Khadduri, a 30-year veteran of Iraq’s atomic-energy program
who emigrated to Canada before the first Gulf War and has long insisted
the administration’s claims were a hoax, also claimed Kay’s
reported decision to leave as vindication.
“His departure suggests that he has been lying and that now he
knows it,’’ Khadduri told IPS. “Since 1994, [Kay] was
obsessed by the idea of knocking over Saddam, no matter what.”
Ritter, whose pre-war skepticism about the administration’s WMD
claims often provoked virulent attacks and even insinuations that he
was working for Saddam, charged the administration is using his capture
“to divert attention from the WMD issue. The test will be whether
Congress and the American people will stand for that,’’ he
said.
