1. The war in Iraq was a continuation of Clinton policy.
"[W]e inherited . . . the policy of the Clinton administration, and it called for regime change. That's something that Bill Clinton decided on. We continued it. We agreed with it. And it said that Saddam Hussein needed to be dealt with and effectively removed from power." (Vice President Cheney, January 2004)
Although regime change was the declared policy of the United States since 1998, the Clinton and Bush administrations pursued vastly different strategies. Clinton never pressed for a war to remove the Iraqi leader; instead, his administration relied on a combination of UN inspections, sanctions and military strikes to weaken Saddam. The Bush administration originally supported this approach. In May 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said "containment, using this arms control sanctions regime, I think has been reasonably successful." In 2000, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had no doubts that Iraq was fully contained: "if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."
These views were overruled by others in the Bush administration in favor of
a war to topple Saddam and to begin the process of removing regimes throughout
the entire Middle East.
2. Everyone thought Iraq had weapons.
"[T]he body of intelligence and the body of evidence that we had that had accumulated over a period of years, not just the United States, the United Kingdom and other, other countries around the world, the previous Administration, the UN over a period of 12 years had established that Iraq had not accounted for stockpiles we knew it had, and we simply believed and had every reason to believe that these stockpiles were there." (Secretary Powell, March 2004)
"We never said there were stockpiles." (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, March 2004)
Prior to 2002, most national and international officials and experts believed
that Iraq likely had research programs and some stores of hidden chemical or
biological weapons and maintained interest in a program to develop nuclear weapons.
The debate that began in 2002 was not over weapons, but over war. Most foreign
governments wanted to give UN inspectors more time to address unresolved disarmament
issues and to determine if war was necessary to disarm Iraq. New evidence from
UN inspectors before the war indicated that there were no active production
programs for nuclear or chemical weapons and there was no evidence of biological
weapon production.
3. All officials based their statements on the available intelligence.
"No one was lying. People were saying what we believed was the best information we had from intelligence." (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, March 2004)
"When we presented our case to the American people and to the world, my presentation at the UN last February, the presentation that went to Congress earlier in the National Intelligence Estimate, we were presenting to the world the facts, as we understood them, from our intelligence analysis. It was not cooked. It was what the intelligence community believed and had reasons to believe." (Secretary of State Colin Powell, March 2004)
Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs. The most important distortions fall into four categories.
First, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were routinely treated as a single WMD threat. Such statements were misleading in that they lumped together the high likelihood that Iraq possessed chemical weapons, which themselves constitute only a minor threat, with the complete lack of evidence that it possessed nuclear weapons which would be a huge threat. Talk of "mushroom clouds" certainly led Americans to believe that the latter were in the picture.
Another source of misunderstanding was the insistence that Saddam Hussein would give whatever weapons he possessed to terrorists. This was unlikely or at best highly debatable. In the judgment of U.S. intelligence, a transfer of WMD by Saddam to terrorists was likely only if he were "sufficiently desperate" in the face of an impending invasion. Even then, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluded that he would likely use his own operatives before terrorists.
The third broad category comprises the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements. The NIE had noted that "We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq's WMD programs" - and was filled with the phrases "we judge" and "we assess." There exists numerous statements by the President, Vice President and Secretaries of State and Defense to the effect that "we know" this or that when the accurate formulation was "we suspect" or "we cannot exclude."
The fourth category includes misrepresentations of inspectors' findings. In
his October 7 speech, the President refers to a finding by UN inspectors that
Iraq had failed to account for a quantity of bacterial growth medium. If that
material had been used, the inspectors had reported, it "could have
produced about three times as much" anthrax as Iraq had admitted to.
The President said this: "The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq
had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive
stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable
of killing millions." (Emphases added) In two sentences, possibility
first becomes likelihood and then a fact.
4. They never said the threat was imminent.
"One of the great myths generated by the president's opponents is that he justified action by claiming the threat posed by Saddam's regime was imminent. Well, the stubborn fact is, that wasn't the president's claim - in fact, he specifically disclaimed that rationale for his decision . . . It is inconsistent with the notion of preemption to argue that the threat is imminent." (Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Kyl, March 2004)
"You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase 'immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's what happened." (Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, March 2004)
Top officials did not often use the word "imminent." However, the
administration did describe the Iraq threat as "immediate," of "unique
urgency," and referenced doomsday images and mushroom clouds in their remarks.
The administration's words conveyed the concept of imminence, even in absence
of the exact phrase. In the interview above, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman
confronted Secretary Rumsfeld with two of his own quotes. In 2002, Rumsfeld
said "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent
. . . I would not be so certain." Rumsfeld had also said "no terrorist
state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people
than the regime of Saddam Hussein and Iraq."
5. They never asserted an operational link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.
"[T]here were connections between al Qaeda and Iraq, but nothing operational, at least that we knew of. And the administration didn't claim otherwise as the justification for war. In fact, when asked directly if there was a connection between Saddam and 9/11, administration officials have generally said, 'We don't know' . . . it is a gross mischaracterization to claim that President Bush sought to make the American people believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he was about to pass to Al Qaeda, and that's why we had to go to war." (Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Kyl, March 2004)
"I believe it has been documented that an agreement existed between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's intelligence organization . . . It gets semantic and splitting definitions to talk about whether it's cooperation or an operational link. The fact is that in this witch's brew of terrorist organizations, there's a lot of collaboration." (Former Defense Policy Board Chair Richard Perle, March 2004)
There is no credible evidence that Iraq actively aided Al Qaeda, and considerable evidence that they did not. The alleged link, however, was critical to the administration's case for war. It excluded deterrence as a viable strategy to contain Saddam and justified the immediate timing of the war. Few would deny that Saddam aided other terrorist organizations such as Palestinian suicide bombers. The administration, however, repeatedly described a close relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, alleging that Iraq harbored and trained Al Qaeda agents in chemical and biological weapons and bomb making. Officials repeated these claims despite the NIE consensus that Iraq was unlikely to collaborate with terrorist groups against the United States or provide them with unconventional weapons.
Although the president never implicated Iraq directly in the September 11 attacks, he did link the two in his speeches and present the possibility of Iraq-Al Qaeda collaboration as the ultimate danger: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." Administration remarks that "We don't know" whether Iraq had a role in September 11 ignored the fact that months of intense investigations had discredited potential connections, such as the Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague, and failed to uncover solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda.
The administration has continued to assert the links by implication. In January 2004, Cheney said in an interview that the "best source of information" on the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection was a Weekly Standard article (based on a leaked memo from the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith) that declared "an operational relationship from the early 1990s." (Several weeks later, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified that the CIA "did not agree with the way the data was characterized" in the memo cited by the article.) Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said March 16, 2004 that "I would say if anything we understated what we thought we knew, particularly on the linkages to terrorism."
Portions of this analysis are adapted from the Carnegie Report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications.
Additional Resources:
- "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," Carnegie Report by Jessica Mathews, George Perkovich, Joseph Cirincione and Alexis Orton, January 2004
- "Iraq on the Record: the Bush Administration's Public Statements About Iraq," Presented by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, March 2004
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