Posted 6:38 AM by Dil
No Political Fallout for Bush on Weapons

By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 17, 2003; Page A01


President Bush appears to be in no political danger from the failure to find chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, with Democrats reluctant to challenge Bush on any aspect of the war and polls showing Americans unconcerned about weapons discoveries.

Disarming Saddam Hussein of his "weapons of mass destruction" was the main justification the Bush administration used both at home and abroad for attacking Iraq. But while other countries that opposed the U.S. military action claim they are vindicated by the failure so far to find those weapons, Americans -- even some of Bush's political opponents -- seem content with the low-casualty victory and believe the discoveries of mass graves and other Hussein atrocities justify the war.

Few Democrats are challenging Bush on the forbidden weapons, preferring to put the war behind them and focus attention on the economy, health care and other domestic issues.

Before the war, for example, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused the administration of exaggerating Iraq's nuclear capabilities, while other Democrats questioned whether Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell were overstating Hussein's chemical and biological stockpiles.

This week, Pelosi said it is "difficult to understand" why the weapons can't be found. Yet she did not seem concerned about whether any are found. "I am sort of agnostic on it; that is to say, maybe they are there," Pelosi said. "I salute the president for the goal of removing weapons of mass destruction."

Similarly, Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), who on the eve of war accused Bush of failing "miserably" to win international backing, now talks of giving the president "great credit" for winning the war.

Why the reticence to remind Bush of the rationale for the war? Public opinion may be one reason.

According to a May 1 Gallup poll for CNN and USA Today, 79 percent of Americans said the war with Iraq was justified even without conclusive evidence of the illegal weapons, while 19 percent said discoveries of the weapons were needed to justify the war. An April Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 72 percent supported the war even without a finding of chemical or biological weapons. Similarly, a CBS News poll found that 60 percent said the war was worth the blood and other costs even if weapons are never found.

It's not that Americans don't care about finding the weapons Bush said Hussein had; in an April 16 Post-ABC poll, 47 percent said it was essential. But that made it a lower priority than providing humanitarian aid to Iraq and restoring order.

"If I were a Democratic candidate, I don't think I would be pushing this issue,' said Andrew Kohut, of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. He cited a Gallup poll in the early days of the war determining that 38 percent thought the war justified even if the banned weapons were not found; toward the end of the conflict, that figure jumped to 58 percent.

"Inasmuch as we've already done the deed, the need for that as a rationale is less," he said.

White House officials express confidence that Bush is not vulnerable on the absence of banned weapons in Iraq, if only because few people in either party doubted that Hussein had such weapons. "Both Republicans and Democrats alike know that Saddam Hussein had a WMD program," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett. "In fact, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that confirmed it. So why would you criticize something the entire world knows to be true?"

In November, the Security Council's unanimously approved Resolution 1441, which found Iraq to be in "material breach" of its disarmament obligations and gave it a "final opportunity to comply." But now even some close allies of the Bush administration say they have serious doubts about the intelligence evidence Bush and his aides used to win passage of that resolution.

Before the war, the administration said that Iraq had not accounted for 25,000 liters of anthrax; 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent; and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. Bush said at the start of the war that Hussein "threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."

But fewer than 60 days later, the group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, is winding down operations without any confirmed discoveries of prohibited weapons.

"It's just very strange," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of a Pentagon advisory board who had predicted weapons would be found a month ago. "There will certainly not be the quantity and proximity that we thought of before." Adelman says Hussein may even have launched "a massive disinformation campaign to make the world think he was violating international norms, and he may not have been."

Gary Schmitt, of the pro-invasion Project for the New American Century, said investigators "may well not find stockpiles, because it may well be that Saddam figured out it was better to get rid of the stuff" and start over after inspectors left.

Neither Adelman nor Schmitt believes the absence of weapons will undermine the public's view that the war was a success. With mass graves being unearthed by the day, Americans will have plenty of humanitarian justification for the war. The discovery of circumstantial evidence -- mobile biological labs, for example -- would provide assurance that Hussein had a prohibited weapons program if not many of the weapons themselves. They say ultimate success will be measured by whether or not Iraq prospers now, not what weapons were found.

But the international community may not be so understanding. False accusations about Iraq's weapons could make the rest of the world even more reluctant to join the next effort to enforce Bush's policy of striking at emerging threats. "The American public is moving on, but those countries that were skeptical of this war are going to continue to press on this point," said Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "The credibility of the administration and the U.S. intelligence community are still on the line. This whole doctrine of preemptive war is predicated on our ability to determine a country's potential threat before the weapons are used."

Among the U.S. electorate, though, the concern about Hussein's weapons programs has been swiftly replaced by an increased sense of security that came with the successful military action. Even fiercely partisan Democrats say privately that they fear criticizing Bush for overstating Hussein's weapons capability could make Democrats appear to be defending Hussein's regime.

The top-tier presidential candidates are figuring it is better not to challenge the popular president on any aspect of the successful war. That's roughly the message former president Bill Clinton delivered at this week's meeting of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. "The formula that will beat George Bush is to match him where he is perceived to be strong -- national security -- and beat him where he is weak -- on his failing economic policies and his divisive social and political agenda," the DLC's Al From told reporters this week.

The only candidate making a big issue of the failure to find weapons stockpiles is Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio), the fervently antiwar candidate. "The basis of the war in Iraq is fraudulent," Kucinich said in an interview. "They misrepresented Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction. They misrepresented the nature of the nuclear threat."

There are reasons other than politics for the Democrats' reluctance to take up the subject. Several, including Pelosi, continue to believe weapons may be found. "If you make that accusation and they find [the weapons] tomorrow and you have a banner headline, you look a little silly," said Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who supported the war resolution.

But even if the weapons are never found, it may be smart politics to let the subject drop. "Our constituents like a victory, and at this point it's a victory," said Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.). "In the beginning, our constituents were saying, 'They better find weapons of mass destruction.' With it over so quickly, we are not hearing that refrain."

Posted 4:07 AM by Dil
So, Mr Straw, why did we go to war?
* Jack Straw, 21 February 2003: 'Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them'
* Jack Straw, 14 May 2003: Asked of the need to find weapons of mass destruction... 'It's not crucial'
By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
15 May 2003


The legal and political basis for the war in Iraq was thrown into doubt yesterday when Jack Straw declared that uncovering Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was "not crucially important".

The Foreign Secretary's comments added to the confusion over the capacity of the former Iraqi leader to unleash chemical or biological weapons, which in the weeks before the Allied invasion had been declared an imminent threat to Britain and the West.

Mr Straw was accused of rewriting history after he appeared to undermine the Government's confident claim that Saddam held up to 10,000 litres of anthrax, declaring: "Ten thousand litres is one third of one petrol tanker. Whether or not we are able to find one third of one petrol tanker in a country twice the size of France remains to be seen."

Asked about Iraq's arsenal on BBC Radio 4, he said only: "I hope there will be further evidence of literal finds." Significantly, Mr Straw used the past tense to describe Iraq's arsenal, saying: "It certainly did exist. There is no question about that, and the Blix report suggested that it still existed."

Challenged on the importance of a fresh weapons find, he said: "It's not crucially important for this reason ... The evidence in respect of Iraq was so strong that the Security Council on the 8th of November said unanimously that Iraq's proliferation and possession of the weapons of mass destruction and unlawful missile systems, as well as its defiance of the United Nations, pose – and I quote – 'a threat to international peace and security'."

Peter Kilfoyle, a former defence minister, said: "Jack Straw is trying to reinvent history. All these claims about WMD are built on sand. If they do not find these weapons, it takes away the only conceivable justification for conducting this war.

"It shows the real reasons for this war: the superpower flexing its muscles and looking after resources, in this case petroleum."

Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, insisted yesterday that the existence of weapons of mass destruction was "the sole justification" for war and confidently predicted that such weapons would eventually be found, pointing to finds of biological protection suits and a vehicle thought to be a mobile biological weapons laboratory.

But Mr Straw's comments were the latest in a series of shifting statements from cabinet ministers about the whereabouts of Saddam's weaponry, the alleged threat from which provided the legal and political justification for the war.

They were in sharp contrast to the Foreign Secretary's speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in February when he declared that some of Saddam's chemical or biological weapons could be deployed "within 45 minutes".

Since then the Foreign Office has, slowly and subtly, changed its rhetoric. While Mr Blair and Mr Hoon continue to exude confidence about the prospects of finding a "smoking gun" in Iraq, Mr Straw has quietly raised the prospect of a different scenario.

He first raised doubts over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction last month when he told MPs not that weapons existed now and would be found, but that "Iraq had illegal possessions of mass destruction and had them recently".

MPs and watching journalists were left with the impression, unchallenged by senior Foreign Office officials, that Britain was no longer completely confident that the elusive weapons would ever be found.

The Foreign Office has stressed that war was amply justified by Iraq's failure to account for weapons holdings dating from after the 1991 Gulf War, detailed in reports by the UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix.

Ministers, including Ruth Kelly, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and the Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien, have used the analogy of the conflict in Northern Ireland to justify the change, arguing that years of searching have failed to uncover the IRA's weapons dumps.

On Tuesday, John Reid, the Leader of the Commons, said he was not surprised that Iraqi weapons had not yet been found.

Mr Straw argued yesterday that the discovery of mass graves at the site of ancient Babylon provided a moral justification for the war.

"You see these pictures in newspapers about the discovery of 15,000 or so mass graves," he said. "Anybody who had any doubt about the rightness of our actions should just draw to their own attention the venality of the Saddam regime, which thankfully has now been removed."

But the Foreign Secretary's comments raised deep concerns in the ranks of Labour MPs already unhappy with the decision to take Britain to war. Doug Henderson, a former armed services minister, and a leading opponent of the war, said: "I think it's pretty essential if any legitimacy is to be maintained that the reason for embarking on this process is proven. If it's not, people will ask what are the motives for war."

Posted 4:02 AM by Dil
Bush Officials Change Tune on Iraqi Weapons
Wed May 14, 2003 12:51 PM ET
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration has changed its tune on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the reason it went to war there. Instead of looking for vast stocks of banned materials, it is now pinning its hopes on finding documentary evidence.

The change in rhetoric, apparently designed in part to dampen public expectations, has unfolded gradually in the past month as special U.S. military teams have found little to justify the administration's claim that Iraq was concealing vast stocks of chemical and biological agents and was actively working on a covert nuclear weapons program.

"The administration seems to be hoping that inconvenient facts will disappear from the public discourse. It's happening to a large degree," said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think-tank which opposed the war.

Few politicians have raised the issue, not wishing to question a popular military victory. However, California Rep. Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said last week she was concerned.

"Though I was convinced of the case made prior to the war, I am increasingly concerned about the lack of progress in uncovering the Iraqi weapons. We need a thorough accounting of what intelligence was available to Congress and war planners before and during the conflict," she said.

In a New York Times/CBS poll released on Tuesday, 49 percent said the administration overestimated the amount of banned weapons in Iraq, while 29 percent said its estimates were accurate and 12 percent said they were low.

Still, 56 percent said the war would still have been worthwhile even if weapons of mass destruction were never found, while 38 percent said it would not have been worth it.

President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told Reuters on Monday that Washington was sending a new team to Iraq to scour for evidence.

The new team will be "more expert" at following the paper trail and other intelligence. She said Iraq appeared to have had a virtually "inspections proof" system of concealing chemical and biological weapons by developing chemicals and agents that could be used for more than one purpose, but that could be put together as weapons at the last minute.

She said U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction.

CHANGE IN RHETORIC

That statement represents a dramatic change from rhetoric from Bush and other top officials before the war, backed up by a steady stream of documents, all of which are still accessible on the White House web site.

In his March 17 speech giving Iraqi President Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave the country, Bush said: "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."

Earlier, in a speech last Oct. 7, Bush said: "The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas ... And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons."

In his State of the Union address last January, Bush accused Iraq of having enough material "to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax -- enough doses to kill several million people ... more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin -- enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure ... as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

In his presentation to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 6, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington "knew" that Baghdad had dispersed rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to locations in western Iraq.

"We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities," Powell said. "There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."

In Congressional testimony in April, Powell said weapons "will be found." He said of his U.N speech, "everything we had there had backup and double sourcing and triple sourcing."

Posted 2:07 PM by Dil
The US was wrong to go in - but now it must not leave

The chances of liberal democracy in Iraq in less than a decade are small

Hugo Young
Tuesday May 13, 2003
The Guardian

The case for the war against Iraq rested on fluctuating rationales. Those of us who opposed it watched with cynical fascination as the words of the statesmen groped for new reasons to suit the predicament they were in. George Bush and Tony Blair had embarked on a policy they could not reverse. At a certain stage, unless Saddam Hussein fled the scene, they were determined to have a war, and finally homed in on two justifications. These had different levels of explicitness. Both now stand in peril of being void. But the failure of one matters a lot more than the other.
The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction is becoming an ever bigger deal. Neither 1,000 new US inspectors nor scores of interrogated Iraqi scientists are delivering the goods. It begins to be more possible to believe that most of the bad stuff was destroyed in the 1990s, and that Iraq was telling something like the truth when it claimed to have no weaponised chemical or biological material.

What we're learning more about than caches of weapons of mass destruction are the ferocious wars between politicians and intelligence agencies in the US and UK. For Mr Blair and the military establishment it remains an article of faith that the WMD exist. Blair says that any other outcome would imply a conspiracy by several agencies - the French and German as well as MI6 and the CIA - to lie to their political masters. Yet there is plenty of competing evidence that agencies were leaned on or sidelined by politicians in pursuit of answers that had become politically imperative.

The New Yorker has carried persuasive details of Donald Rumsfeld's creation of a private intelligence group to produce analyses both of the weapons of mass destruction issue and the al-Qaida connection that the CIA's professional scepticism restrained it from delivering. MI6 was seemingly complicit in a crude forgery of documents designed to show that Niger supplied Iraq with nuclear material. Downing Street was willing to stitch together an old academic paper and pretend it was a hot intelligence assessment.

All this happened in support of the WMD thesis, when it was up-front as the leading reason for the war. It was, after all, the only way of conferring legality. A war to enforce UN resolutions came to be defined as the essential link to what was internationally lawful. So the assertion of the presence of WMD in Iraq, even when they had not been discovered, continued as the lynchpin of the public case Bush and Blair made.

The failure of the weapons to turn up is, therefore, embarrassing. It should leave a permanent scar on the credibility of anything any government has to say about war and intelligence. It reminds us that when a war script has been written, the end is taken to justify any political means. But does it now do more than provide sniping material for the critics? Does it matter at the present conjunction of Iraqi events? Not as much as a failure of the second rationale, the ambition for political reform in Baghdad.

At the time, this was seldom made explicit. It filtered through Blair's passionate moralism about creating a decent society, but neither coalition partner talked easily about regime change. Pre-emptive war was a new enough concept, alarming in its implications. Naked intervention to impose a new politics on a sovereign state would have been an outrage too great to admit to. So, at any rate, it seemed to Washington and London. As it certainly did to their critics.

But again, circumstances have to alter judgment. Iraq is where it is. The war was won. Saddam has gone. The high ground, if semi-covert, case of the neo-conservative faction that drove Bush towards this war always was for a regime change that opened the way for Iraq to become some kind of magnetic pole of democracy in the Middle East.

I think that those of us who recoiled from the war on any grounds, and certainly on that one, now need to give its exponents the time to see what can be done. Those who once said the US must never go near Iraq should now urge the US to stay there, with every serious commitment it can muster.

Making the place safe for political freedom is a fantastically ambitious task. We keep being told that George Bush is not a simple man, but he talks about democracy as if it were a commodity ripe for handing over to the ready-made Mesopotamian heirs of Thomas Jefferson. The odds defined by culture and history make the liberal democracy of Iraq an improbable bet in anything less than a decade, if then.

I spent the weekend thinking about this in a different context, at a conference of a fledgling seminar called Ameurus. This is a group brought together by that most fertile animator of such projects, George Weidenfeld, to seek out the common ground between America, Europe and Russia. To hear the Russian speakers, keen democrats all, talk gloomily about human rights and elections and the rule of law was to be reminded how very difficult it is for democracy to penetrate the life and experience of people who are not used to it. Even a society educated in western traditions, knowledgeable in democratic theory, and unencumbered by religious allegiances that challenge it, has a long way to go before becoming a democracy in heart and mind.

In Iraq we've soon seen how unprepared the US was for the ambition it had. It didn't bring policemen, let alone nation-builders. It has not brought elementary order to the streets, and its first cohort of proconsuls has already been deemed incompetent and sent home. Its clumsiness reveals a Pentagon apparatus better equipped to win a war than contribute to the peace. And don't forget: the builders of the democratic dream were, and are, in the Pentagon.

The message from the early calamities is to reinforce the need for an international approach. Perhaps Mr Blair can play a more effective role than he did before the war, and persuade Washington that what many nations will do for both the reconstruction and the political reform of Iraq is far more important than the effacing of the UN, on which those same Pentagon thinkers seem bent. Their political project has not the slightest hope of working as a unilateral act of imposition.

But they need to be committed. If they're serious about democracy, they'll have to pay for it: 75,000 troops and $20bn a year for several years to stabilise the peace, according to an estimate by the Council on Foreign Relations. They need to learn the subtlety required to preside over the emergence of genuine consultative mechanisms that might lead towards free politics in some sort of federal system. Above all they have to engage the world as leader not hegemon.

These would be hard concessions for the US. They would change the mindset of the Bush administration. But if their priority is as they state, we should now help to hold them to it.