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U.S. Hedges on Finding Iraqi Weapons
Officials Cite the Possibility of Long or Fruitless Search for Banned Arms

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 29, 2003; Page A01


Pressed in recent congressional hearings and public appearances to explain why the United States has been unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, senior Bush administration officials have begun to lay the groundwork for the possibility that it may take a long time, if ever, before they are able to prove the expansive case they made to justify the war.

In the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, administration officials charged that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had spent billions of dollars developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and was poised to hand them over to international terrorists or fire them at U.S. troops or neighboring countries.

Nearly two months after the fall of Baghdad, officials continue to express confidence that the weapons will be found. "No one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an interview yesterday. Wolfowitz said the administration's prewar emphasis on the existence of weapons of mass destruction stemmed from "one of the most widely-shared intelligence assessments that I know of. . . . We're a long way" from exhausting the search.

But in speeches and comments in recent weeks, senior administration officials have begun to lower expectations that weapons will be found anytime soon, if at all, and suggested they may have been destroyed, buried or spirited out of the country.

The U.S. invasion force moved so quickly into Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday in response to questions at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, that the Iraqis "didn't have time to . . . use chemical weapons. . . . They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer."

Looking back at the spotlight the administration cast on the weapons issue in building its case for war, Wolfowitz said, "There was no oversell." But he acknowledged yesterday that there "had been a tendency to emphasize the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issue" as the primary justification for war because of differences of opinion within the administration over the strength of other charges against the Iraqi government, including its alleged ties to al Qaeda.

"The issue of WMD has never been in controversy," Wolfowitz said, "where there's been a lot of arguing back and forth about whether the Iraqis were involved in terrorism."

In a briefing for reporters yesterday, senior intelligence officials released what they said was the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." After examining two tractor-trailers found last month in Iraq, the officials said they found no trace of biological agents but added they are "highly confident" the high-tech equipment built into them was intended to produce biological weapons.

In pressing for international approval of war, President Bush and his top aides said that Iraq possessed weapons that posed an immediate threat to its neighbors and to U.S. territory, and that U.N. inspectors were unlikely to find them in time. Since the Iraqi government collapsed April 9, U.S. military teams have been unsuccessful in finding any proscribed weapons. The teams are being replaced by a much larger weapons survey group that has yet to arrive in Iraq.

The Pentagon has rejected suggestions that U.N. inspectors who left Iraq before the war be allowed to reenter the country and resume their search, although agreement has been reached with the International Atomic Energy Agency to send its experts to secure the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, a nuclear storage site 30 miles south of Baghdad that had been under IAEA seal for years. The site has been looted by Iraqis, and U.S. military teams found high levels of radiation there.

But the agreement restricts the IAEA to a small area within the facility, and specifically prohibits the agency's emergency teams from investigating reports that some of the material has been removed and may be causing radiation sickness in some local communities. "The U.S. has informed us that, as the occupying powers, they have the responsibility for the welfare of the Iraqi people, including the nuclear health and safety issues," an IAEA spokesman said.

Those mild words mask a dispute between the administration and the international agency, which first raised the danger posed by potential looting of the Tuwaitha site and others April 10.

Having rejected the efforts of U.N. inspectors as insufficient before the war, the administration was not about to let them back in to look for weapons now, a senior administration official said, suggesting that the IAEA was looking for a pretext for a wider role in Iraq. "Make no mistake, the IAEA wanted to get back in and do its former inspection role," the official said. "And they were told, in no uncertain terms, no."

The administration has also rejected the readmission into Iraq of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), which had responsibility for finding chemical and biological weapons, as well as production facilities. Before the war, U.S. officials expressed strong doubts the U.N. inspectors would be able to locate, among other things, the mobile biological laboratories that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell first described to the U.N. Security Council in February.

The two trailers cited by intelligence officials yesterday have been under examination since they were found in northern Iraq last month. The officials said that key equipment in the trailers -- fermenters needed to produce biological agents -- was manufactured in 2002 and 2003, indicating that the units were recently built. They said Iraqi employees at the al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development and Engineering facility where the fermenters were constructed told them they were used to produce hydrogen gas for weather balloons and other purposes.

But an intelligence official called that "a cover story," and said it would be an "inefficient" use of the facilities. Instead, U.S. officials said the labs closely resembled the description of mobile biological trailers provided in 1999 by an Iraqi defector whose information was the basis for Powell's presentation.

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former U.N. weapons inspector, said yesterday that "the government's finding is based on eliminating any possible alternative explanation for the trucks, which is a controversial methodology under any circumstances." In the absence of "conclusive evidence," Albright suggested that an independent, international investigation was needed, and that "the logical group to perform this investigation is UNMOVIC."

Beginning with Vice President Cheney last August, administration officials delivered a series of speeches expressing absolute certainty the Iraqi weapons existed. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said in an Aug. 26 address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

In October, Wolfowitz said, "Saddam Hussein is not going to easily give up the horrible weapons that he has worked so hard to obtain and paid such a high price to keep," using a phrase that he and Rumsfeld were to repeat often. "This is a man who has shown that he'll give up billions and billions of dollars every year," Rumsfeld said in November, "so that he can be free to develop those weapons and to have those weapons and to use those weapons to terrorize other countries."

In congressional testimony last week, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith said he was "confident that we will eventually be able to piece together a fairly complete account of Iraq's WMD programs, but the process will take months, and perhaps years." In the interim, the House Select Committee on Intelligence has asked CIA Director George J. Tenet to review the intelligence underlying administration statements about Iraqi weapons. A similar request has come from the Senate committee, which has asked about specific claims regarding an Iraqi nuclear program.

"I think there are a whole lot of other questions about WMD which are very, very unclear," Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "They may have overestimated."



© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Here's an op-ed piece from the NY Times. Two points [of many] of interest: Bush/Blair had no intention of ever negotiating a peaceful settlement, and with more and more evidence mounting re: the deceit surrounding this war, very few seem to care. What gives, America?



Waggy Dog Stories
By PAUL KRUGMAN


An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public's consciousness.

The 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" had quite a plot.

Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial.

The Iraq war was very real, even if its Kodak moments — the toppling of the Saddam statue, the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch — seem to have been improved by editing. But much of the supposed justification for the war turns out to have been fictional.

The war was justified to the public by links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. No evidence of the Qaeda link has ever surfaced, and no W.M.D.'s that could have posed any threat to the U.S. or its allies have been found.

The failure to find W.M.D.'s has been described as an "intelligence failure," but this ignores the fact that intense pressure was placed on intelligence agencies to tell the Bush and Blair administrations what they wanted to hear. Even before the war began we learned of such pratfalls as the presentation of a plagiarized, decade-old report about Iraqi capabilities as hot new intelligence, and the use of crudely forged documents as evidence of a nuclear program.

Last fall the former head of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism efforts warned that "cooked intelligence" was finding its way into official pronouncements. This week a senior British intelligence official told the BBC that under pressure from Downing Street, a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been "transformed" to make it "sexier" — uncorroborated material from a suspect source was added to make the threat appear imminent.

It's now also clear that George W. Bush had no intention of reaching a diplomatic solution. According to The Financial Times, White House sources confirm that the decision to go to war was reached in December: "A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House," a source told the newspaper.

Administration officials are now playing down the whole W.M.D. issue. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for "bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." But it was the W.M.D. issue that stampeded the Senate into giving Mr. Bush carte blanche to wage war.

For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care — or even want to know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." And three-quarters of the public thinks that President Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq.

So what's the problem? Wars fought to deal with imaginary threats have real consequences. Just as war critics feared, Al Qaeda has been strengthened by the war. Iraq is in chaos, with a rising death toll among American soldiers: "We have reports of skirmishes throughout the central region," a Pentagon official told The Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, the administration has just derived considerable political advantage from a war waged on false premises. At best, that sets a very bad precedent. At worst. . . . "You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war," explains Robert DeNiro's political operative in "Wag the Dog." "It's show business."

A final note: Showtime is filming a docudrama about Sept. 11. The producer is a White House insider, working in close consultation with Karl Rove. The script shows Mr. Bush as decisive and eloquent. "In this movie," The Globe and Mail reports, "Mr. Bush delivers long, stirring speeches that immediately become policy." And we can be sure that the script doesn't mention the bogus story about a threat to Air Force One that the White House floated to explain Mr. Bush's movements on the day of the attack. Hey, it's show business.

Two points [of many] of interest: Bush/Blair had no intention of ever negotiating a peaceful settlement, and with more and more evidence mounting re: the deceit surrounding this war, very few seem to care. What gives, America?

No one cares about the deceit because they all bought the deceit. As the piece points out, polls are showing that many people think we've already found WMD in Iraq. In any event, most people (erroneously) think that Iraq was behind 9/11, so the war will always be justified in their minds no matter what happens in the WMD front. (I am awaiting the poll in a few months that will show most people think the 9/11 hijackers were Iranian.)

More importantly, though, people don't seem to care. To question our mission, right and obligation to beat the Middle East (and anyone else we don't like) into submission is to be unpatriotic and treasonous. (BTW, I saw a "Boycott France" sticker on a Nissan the other day. The driver obviously was oblivious to the fact that Renault owns nearly half of Nissan.) Whatever Bush does is right, end of story.

The entire country is, in large part, willfully and enthusiastically going along for this ride.

Ryan

Rspaight wrote:The entire country is, in large part, willfully and enthusiastically going along for this ride.

So it would seem. The consequences of recent American behavior on the world stage aside, one's certainly got to be concerned about the future of democracy in the U.S. Maybe I've had my head up my ass, but I for one am flabbergasted at the [non] concern so far shown by Americans at this deceit.

The bombing of Cambodia during the Viet Nam war? Watergate? Iran-Contra? Monica? The war with Iraq would seem to be the single most significant abuse of presidential authority in my lifetime.

I'd have to agree with that, Ron. It seems to me that 9/11 was the green light for a lot of this:

- It really cranked up the nationalism. The whole "with us or against us" notion, the near-mandatory sporting of flag pins, patriotic bumper stickers and huge flags flying everywhere. Nothing wrong with patriotism, of course, but it tends to aggravate the other factors when it shades into nationalism, thus blinding people to alternative points of view. If questioning the administration is unpatriotic, that pretty much gives Bush carte blanche, doesn't it?

- It scared a lot of people. Well, duh. Most of the world lives with terrorism, but this act was mind-boggling by any standard. However, what we do with that fear is important. Instead of asking what the hell is going on in the world that causes nutjobs like bin Laden to get followers and power, most people instead opted for the "let's go kill some Ay-rabs" response. Saddam, bin Laden, Iraq, al-Qaeda, didn't really matter. To many Americans, they're all the same.

- In a variation on the above, it put the country into a war mindset. Phrases like "homeland security," "war on terrorism," "terror alert level" and so on were inserted into the national vocabulary. We were told daily how we were at war and would be at war for the forseeable future, and, not coincidentally, how our safety depended on trusting the administration to prosecute the war fully. Once we're already "at war," it's a small jump to invading a country full of people with names that sound like the names of the people who attacked us.

- Finally, it put us in a victim mindset. Any questioning of the Iraq war was countered with "Are you saying what they did to us on 9/11 was right?" following by flag waving and a hearty rendition of "God Bless America." We were wronged, by God, and that made anything we chose to do in response right by default. We're talking about good and evil here, you know.

In the middle of all that, coincidentally, comes the deregulation of the media and loss of independent journalism. Many, many Americans get their "news" from right-wing mouthpieces like Fox News and talk radio. More "mainstream" sources like CNN are still reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. All the newspapers are owned by big media conglomerates that want to keep the administration happy, so they can reap the benefits of continuing media deregulation (as happened on Monday) and endless corporate tax-cutting. So a few words of doubt seep in occasionally, but most of the coverage is pretty rah-rah in the outlets most people see.

Flipping channels this past weekend, I stumbled on a NASCAR race, one of the best windows into the American "man on the street" mindset. During the opening ceremonies, a bunch of soldiers marched onto the infield. Someone sang "God Bless America." Then they did the national anthem. Then a bunch of fighter jets flew overhead. Then a bunch of Black Hawk helicopters. Then more jets. Then a big bomber. Then another transport of some sort. It just didn't stop. All the while, the crowd was cheering wildly, waving flags (they all had flags), whooping and hollering.

Presidential lies about WMD? You think anyone in that crowd cares?

Ryan