Just a couple of days before the war in Iraq began, Dick Cheney was on Meet the Press to discuss the need for the U.S. invasion. Tim Russert asked Cheney, “What do you think is the most important rationale for going to war with Iraq?”
Cheney didn’t hesitate. “Well, I think I’ve just given it, Tim, in terms of the combination of his development and use of chemical weapons, his development of biological weapons, his pursuit of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Well, it’s been nine months. We’ve looked and looked, but found nothing. As the AP recently noted, “In nine months, not a single item has been found in Iraq from a long and classified intelligence list of weapons of mass destruction which guided the work of dozens of elite teams from Special Forces, the military, the CIA and the Pentagon during the most secretive, expensive and fruitless weapons hunt in history.”
The Washington Post ran an excellent report today on the front page explaining why. In a story headlined, “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” the Post explained that Saddam Hussein definitely had some weapons that he was not supposed to have and that he actively hid from UN weapons inspectors. But when it came to actual WMD, Hussein may have wanted them, and made preliminary plans to develop some, but when Bush told us of Iraq’s vast stockpiles of weapons that could wreak havoc on the world, those weapons didn’t actually exist.
Iraq’s former government engaged in abundant deception about its ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or production. Interviews here — among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from the U.S. and British governments — turned up unreported records, facilities or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.
But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen — combining pox virus and snake venom — that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a ‘grave and gathering danger’ by President Bush and a ‘mortal threat’ by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.
A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq’s biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.