by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700

Copyright October 7, 2004
All Rights Reserved.

olliding like two drunk drivers, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney joined hands going over the falls, admitting that Iraq possessed no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Placing Bush's reelection in doubt, their admission reflects the current upheaval in the White House spin machine. Prompted by a new CIA report that Saddam destroyed his WMD in 1991, the White House has lost its rationale for war. Only a threat to U.S. national security justified placing American lives in harm's way. With nearly 1,100 casualties and more than 7,000 injuries, the White House has a lot of explaining to do asking American soldiers to sacrifice their lives. Talk of disarming a brutal tyrant, battling terrorists, liberating an oppressed people, enforcing U.N. sanctions and now abusing Saddam's oil-for-food program all sound hollow without finding WMD.

    Without a threat to U.S. national security, the war in Iraq is a tough sell. Telling people the world is safer with Saddam sitting in jail doesn't assuage the grief of families whose loved ones have paid the ultimate price. Blaming his rationale for war on abuses in Saddam's oil-for-food program goes over the top. It wasn't that long ago that Bush and Cheney were absolutely convinced that weapons inspectors would find WMD. Shifting to Saddam's oil-for-food program marks a new low—and desperation—to contain a growing credibility crisis. Admitting that Saddam had no stockpiles on WMD wasn't the smartest damage control strategy, containing growing doubts about the administration's rationale for war. “You don't make up or find reasons to go to war after the fact,” said Sen. John Kerry, calling Bush on the carpet for manufacturing more excuses for war.

    Bush and Cheney can't have it both ways: Claim to have confidence in U.S. weapons hunter Charles Duelfer and then attack his findings when they harm White House credibility. Duelfer's final report on Iraq's WMD indicates that Saddam hadn't made WMD since 1991. Duelfer found no evidence that Saddam reconstituted his weapons programs but conceded that if sanctions were ended he might resume. Bush and Cheney seized on that “intent” or possibility as the justification for war. “As soon as the sanctions were lifted, he had every intention of getting back” to building WMD, said Cheney, implying that preemptive war was needed to stop Saddam's evil “intent.” Yet when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell pitched the WMD case Feb. 5, 2003 to the U.N. Security Council, he displayed photographic proof of Saddam's mobile weapons labs thanks to Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.

    Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and former Pentagon contractor, aspired to be Iraq's new prime minister, feeding Cheney and the Pentagon bogus reports about Saddam's mobile germ weapons labs. Only recently has Bush and Cheney acknowledged that truck-based labs never existed. Powell's hard sell at the Security Council convinced only the White House that it was time to launch preemptive war. Powell wasn't selling “intent” when he made his case at the Security Council. “Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believe were there,” said Bush, blaming the CIA. Former CIA Director George Tenet took the fall, obscuring the real intelligence failures. Even the CIA relied on intelligence from former Iraqi exiles with an ax to grind. Cheney got his “intelligence” from Iraqi exiles feeding his neocon friends at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.

    Bush and Cheney still insist that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. They continue to assert a link between Saddam's “intent” to make WMD and Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terror network. Enforcing U.N. sanctions doesn't justify liquidating the U.S. treasury and sacrificing more American lives. Admitting that Saddam didn't possess stockpiles of WMD opens up a host of alternative motives for the Iraq war. If it wasn't to protect U.S. national security or to fight the war on terror, then what were the real motives? Europeans speculated that the White House sought to plunder Iraq's mineral wealth. Another theory had Bush avenging Saddam's aborted assassination attempt on his father in 1991. It's inconceivable that the Iraq war was only about billon-dollar contracts to multinational companies closely tied to the White House, Bush family and friends.

    Bush's recent slippage in the polls comes from more than his poor showing in the first presidential debate. Cumulative bad news from multiple sources all point to the Iraq war as a colossal mistake. While Bush and Cheney talk about winning the war, the deteriorating security situation in Iraq says otherwise. Miscellaneous leaks from White House officials and elsewhere suggest that Saddam was never a threat to U.S. national security. Recent public remarks by former Iraqi civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III that there were too few troops to succeed and by Defense Secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld that there was no “hard evidence" of WMD also hurt White House credibility. Despite these mistakes, Bush and Cheney insist they would have done things exactly the same way. If that's the case, then maybe the “inconceivable” might very well explain why the whole mess was worth it.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He's editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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