Los Angeles Times
October 9, 2004
The head of the CIA's weapons-hunting team dropped 1,000 pages worth of
anticlimax on the table Wednesday, pointing out what the world has known for
well over a year: Iraq did not possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
when the United States went to war last year. If a molecule of enriched uranium
or a vial of anthrax had been found, trumpets would have sounded long before
this.
President Bush's justifications for war are many and still
changing, but the argument that it was needed to force Iraq to comply with years
of U.N. Security Council demands that it get rid of weapons of mass destruction
has been ground into the dust yet again. There was nothing to disarm.
The report is a devastating indictment of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies
that assumed Iraq must have had arsenals prohibited by United Nations sanctions.
Those assumptions were erroneous, but they were not harebrained.
In his
book "Disarming Iraq," Hans Blix, former director of the U.N. Inspection
Commission an d an opponent of the invasion, states that U.N. inspections
— which resumed shortly before the war after inspectors had been expelled
years earlier — were making progress but had not resolved whether Iraq
still possessed banned weapons. Even Saddam Hussein's leading generals thought
the country at least had chemical weapons of the type used in its war against
Iran more than a decade earlier. The report says the military leaders were
amazed when Hussein told them shortly before the invasion that there were no
such weapons.
Hussein's deceptions were intended to keep Iran at bay,
but when he claimed on the eve of war not to have the weapons, he had no
credibility. U.S. officials, who made intelligence seem more certain than it
was and who were eager to believe defectors' lies, were in no mood to listen.
There were few vigorous rebuttals to their findings.
Charles A.
Duelfer, who released the report, was head of the CIA's team of weapons hunters
in Iraq. Wednesday, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Hussein
had actually complied with U.N. demands after his ignominious defeat in the
1991 Gulf War.
Iraq got rid of its chemical and biological weapons
— it never had nuclear weapons — and never rebuilt its
illicit-weapons programs.
But Duelfer also reported that Hussein hoped
someday to reconstitute the deadly weapons programs once the U.N. ended its
sanctions. And his report on Hussein's ability to siphon billions of dollars
from the U.N.-authorized oil-for-food program shows the dictator could have
become dangerous again if other nations had dropped their guard, as many seemed
willing to do.
The report certainly indicates that Hussein was dangerous
and may someday have become a threat. But the chief argument for the Iraq war
remains thoroughly discredited.
Hussein was not a military danger to the
United States or even his own region at the time he was overthrown, no matter
how thoroughly he pretended to be one.