Hiding Behind Secrecy

All things must come to an end, and so it proved with the massive post-invasion scouring of Iraq in search for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD). On Jan. 12, 2005, the Bush administration quietly confirmed press reports that the unit in charge of the search, the Iraq Survey Group, has broken off its fruitless effort to find them. This event deserves much more than the cursory comment it received. After all, the U.S. invasion started as a crusade to prevent mushroom clouds over American cities or dastardly biological and chemical attacks by an Iraqi regime the Bush administration portrayed as chomping at the bit to get at us. What we hear today about the reasons for Iraq—that it is about bringing democracy to this Persian Gulf land, that an oppressive dictator needed to be overthrown—are feel-good rationales that began as subsidiary arguments to buttress those about the "real" supposed threat. Those reasons came to the fore as the Bush people's WMD claims progressively eroded. The true story here is a tale of the power of the bully pulpit, the power of the presidency to shape opinion and even mislead it in service of ill-considered policy goals.

The Lie That Keeps On Giving

In its push to ensure that the failure of the Iraq Survey Group be merely a one-day blip in media reporting, the Bush administration treated Americans to more of the same obfuscation to which it resorted in the original push to war. White House press secretary Scott McClellan explained that the survey group report by Charles Duelfer said that Saddam "retained the intent and capability" to build weapons and dismissed the entire issue as old news, something President Bush had talked about last October when Duelfer made a public report. McClellan's Jan. 12 statement insisted that all this can be traced back to intelligence failure. President Bush—and presumably all Americans—should wait to hear the findings on WMD intelligence expected from a presidential commission now examining that question.

McClellan is misleading on both counts. What President Bush said on Oct. 7, 2004, was that the Iraq Survey Group report "confirms the earlier conclusion by David Kay [Duelfer's predecessor] that Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there"—and given the report's content, he could hardly maintain otherwise. But Bush insisted that "based on all the information we have to date, I believe we were right to take action." The information to date, as laid out in exhaustive detail in Duelfer's report, was that Iraq had no WMD, had destroyed in the 1990s what weapons remained to it after the Gulf War, had no programs to develop such weapons (though it did do work on missile systems that might be used with future WMD), and had few resources to devote to WMD programs (oil smuggling notwithstanding). 

As McClellan continues to assert, Bush also affirmed the opposite: Saddam "retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction." In contrast, the Iraq Survey Group found ambition to resume work on weapons in the future when resources became available and United Nations sanctions eroded, and a "guiding theme" to "sustain the intellectual capacity achieved." Absent were the materials and means, plus specific Iraqi action to develop weapons of mass destruction in the near term.

No Threat To America

Much as Bush administration rhetoric has shifted to different justifications for the Iraq war, what has completely disappeared from discussions of WMD is the repeated prewar assertion that Iraqi weapons (if they existed) were for the purpose of attacking the United States. What the Iraq Survey Group found was that Saddam's intentions, such as they were, were to deter Iran (with which Saddam had fought a decade-long war in the 1980s) and serve as "a symbol and a normal process of modernity." As for the United States, in a passage blocked out in bold, Duelfer's report concluded that "Saddam did not consider the United States a natural adversary ... and he hoped that Iraq might again enjoy improved relations."