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Who needs WMD when you've got
Saddam?
By Jim Lobe
 WASHINGTON
- 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 now evidently 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 have moved 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 [September 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 so
they are less likely to ask embarrassing questions about
what the president knew and when.
Hoping
voters will forget WMD
"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 weapons 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 that 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-Qaeda
and other terrorist groups that were already, in effect,
waging war against the US.
While Washington's
claims about Iraq's WMD stockpiles were largely accepted
- many of the same claims were made by the former Bill
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-Qaeda met with skepticism from 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.
Rumsfeld: We know where the WMD
are
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld even declared
to reporters March 30, or 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 having a chemical weapons program
since 1991. But he stressed that the Iraq Survey Group,
the weapons hunters, had found "laboratories" that could
be used to develop WMD.
WMD hunters quietly
redeployed
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 programme who emigrated
to Canada before the first Gulf War and has long
insisted the administration's claims were a hoax, also
saw Kay's reported decision to leave as a 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.
(Inter Press
Service)
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