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“We all thought there was weapons there,” President George W. Bush explained to a
presidential debate moderator in 2004 when asked if the absence of weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq undercut the rationale for occupying the country.
The claim that the entire world agreed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has been asserted countless times by
the Bush administration and its supporters since we all learned it was the stuff of
fiction. “Everybody agreed,” former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told
Wolf Blitzer in May 2007. “We all thought that the intelligence case was strong,”
Condoleezza Rice said in April 2007, adding that even, “the U.N weapons inspectors
[thought] Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.... So there’s no blame
here of anyone.” Etc., etc.
The media almost always embrace this excuse, as well. Yet former White House Press
Secretary Scott McClellan’s revelatory new memoir, together with the quietly
released report on intelligence manipulation by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, leave no doubt that the Bush administration took the nation into war on
false pretenses of mushroom clouds and weapons trailers.
Karl Rove, for example, told Bill O’Reilly on May 29 when talking about McClellan’s
book that, “everybody in the West, every major intelligence agency in the world,
thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” We hate to be the
proverbial skunk at this garden party, but let’s roll back the clock for a moment to
see what “everyone” actually said and thought at the time.
Let us begin with America’s own intelligence agencies. Did they agree there were
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Well, no. The aforementioned Select Committee
on Intelligence report, which was signed by all of the committee’s Democrats, along
with two Republicans, said that while the administration’s statements on Iraq’s
nuclear capabilities were supported by some intelligence, the administration’s
statements, “did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the
intelligence community.”
On the issue of weapons of mass destruction in general, the report found that
administration officials exhibited a “higher level of certainty than the intelligence
judgments themselves.” The report also found that, “Statements by the President
and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding
Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the
intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.”
We know also that the Bush administration encouraged the CIA to go as far as
possible in supporting its case. The Washington Post reported in June 2003 that
Cheney and his Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, personally visited CIA analysts working
on the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 in order to inspire a re-examination of
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the case, something that no one could remember happening in any previous
administration.
Top administration officials, including President Bush and Vice-President Dick
Cheney, were also aware of some notable people in the intelligence community who
disagreed about WMD claims. Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe
division, revealed on “60 Minutes” that in the fall of 2002 President Bush, Vice
President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and others were
told by CIA Director George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister—who agreed to act as a
spy for the United States—had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass
destruction program. Two former senior CIA officials later confirmed this account to
Salon’s Sidney Blumenthal.
Secretary of State Colin Powell also disagreed at one time—although well before his
much-publicized speech to the United Nations in February 2003. Speaking two years
earlier in Cairo, Powell had this to say: “He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to
project conventional power against his neighbors.”
Anthony Zinni, the Marine general who commanded the air assault in the first Gulf
War, also had doubts. “Up until Desert Fox, I believed that [Saddam] had WMD,” he
told authors Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier. “Then Clinton said we would bomb
the WMD sides. I asked the intelligence community for the targets, but they couldn’t
give me any. Nothing they gave me was definitively a WMD target. They were all
dual-use. That’s when my doubts began.”
Intelligence agencies and top administration officials aside, who else didn’t agree
that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? What about politicians?
Here are two of the most senior members of the U.S. Senate:
• Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), in September 2002: “[I]nformation from the
intelligence community over the past six months does not point to Iraq as an
imminent threat to the United States or a major proliferator of weapons of mass
destruction.”
• Robert Byrd (D-WV), on the day of the invasion: “The case this administration
tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified
documents and circumstantial evidence.”
Were these reports really unavailable to everyone? We don’t think so:
• On September 19, 2002, Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick described a
report “by independent experts who questioned whether thousands of high-
strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret
nuclear weapons program,” as the administration was contending.
• On January 30, 2003, Walter Pincus and Dana Priest reported that the
evidence the administration was amassing about Baghdad hiding weapons
equipment and documents “is still circumstantial.”
• Despite the Bush administration’s claims about WMDs, another Pincus story,
this one three days before the invasion, began: “U.S. intelligence agencies have
been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the
amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to
administration officials and members of Congress,” raising questions “about
whether administration officials have exaggerated intelligence.”
• Harper’s publisher John MacArthur was calling bull on Judy Miller’s New York
Times reporting on WMDs as early as 2003, writing that “When officials leak a
‘fact’ to Ms. Miller, they then can cite her subsequent stenography in the Times
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• Scott Ritter, who was chief weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991 and 1998, added
this, about the world’s intelligence agencies: “[W]e knew that while we couldn’t
account for everything that the Iraqis said they had destroyed, we could only
account for 90 to 95 percent, we knew that: (a) we had no evidence of a
retained capability and, (b) no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting. And
furthermore, the C.I.A. knew this. The British intelligence knew this; Israeli
intelligence knew this; German intelligence. The whole world knew this.”
So, in short, the claim that “everyone agreed” that the evidence of Iraqi WMD was
incontrovertible is simply false. It’s another example of the kind of lazy, gullible
reporting in the face of a campaign of deliberate deception that got us into this
horrific mess in the first place.
Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a
Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism
at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at
http://www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A
Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, was recently published by Viking.
George Zornick is a New York-based writer.