Potential Iraq WMD-Terror Alliance Justified Iraq War, Cheney Says in Debate

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration decided to invade Iraq and remove the regime of then-President Saddam Hussein because the country was viewed as the “most likely” nation to share weapons of mass destruction with terrorists, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said during the vice presidential debate last night.

Cheney’s remarks prompted his challenger for the job, Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), to charge the vice president with not “being straight” about any prewar Iraqi threat and to suggest the administration had neglected more serious potential proliferation concerns from North Korea and Iran.  

Cheney’s remarks also came despite a substantial and growing body of conclusions by credible government sources that an Iraqi relationship with terrorists was not developing and that Iraq possessed no WMD stockpiles. The federal Sept. 11 commission concluded that there was no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and al-Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials have indicated prewar Iraq was not deemed an imminent threat, and U.S. investigators in Iraq are expected to report today that Iraq posed a diminishing WMD threat before the war (see related GSN story, today).

Cheney criticized the argument of presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) that a U.S. president must show the Americans and the world that a U.S. attack is justified, and said that knowing what he knows now, he would still have advised attacking Iraq.

“The effort that we’ve mounted with respect to Iraq focused specifically on the possibility that this was the most likely nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said in response to a question.

“What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I’d recommend exactly the right — same course of action,” he said.

President George W. Bush, debating Kerry last week, reiterated his administration’s position that the war on Iraq was justified because the United States “must take threats seriously before they fully materialize (see GSN, Oct. 1).”

Edwards said Cheney was suggesting a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda that did not exist.

“You’ve gone around the country suggesting that there is some connection. There’s not.  And in fact, the CIA is now about to report that the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein is tenuous at best. And in fact, the secretary of defense said yesterday that he knows of no hard evidence of the connection. We need to be straight with the American people,” Edwards said.

Edwards accused the Bush administration of prematurely starting a war with Iraq, cutting off U.N. inspections of the country that might have revealed “what we now know, that in fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney said that “there’s clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror. And the point is that that’s the place where you’re most likely to see the terrorist come together with weapons of mass destruction, the deadly technologies that Saddam Hussein had developed and used over the years.”

“The concern about Iraq specifically focused on the fact that Saddam Hussein had been for years listed on the state sponsor of terror; that he had established relationships with Abu Nidal, who operated out of Baghdad; [Hussein] paid $25,000 to the families of suicide bombers; and he had an established relationship with al-Qaeda,” Cheney said.

Cheney’s suggestion last night that Iraq might have shared weapons of mass destruction in the future with al-Qaeda echoed remarks he and Bush have made on the campaign trail this summer.

At a campaign speech Saturday in Ohio, Bush called Iraq a “gathering danger” and Hussein “a threat.”

“We didn’t find the stockpiles we all thought were there.  But, remember, Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction.  He could have passed that capability onto a terrorist enemy, and that was a risk we could not afford to take after Sept. 11,” he said.

Such comments appear at odds with assessments by the intelligence community and other top officials recently.

A new CIA assessment reported Monday by Knight Ridder said there was no evidence that Hussein’s regime harbored alleged Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. 

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at an event this week that he had seen no “strong, hard evidence” linking Hussein and al-Qaeda and that suspected Jordanian terrorist al-Zarqawi, believed responsible for beheadings of Westerners and other terrorism in Iraq, was probably not allied to bin Laden.

Cheney last night said there were still questions about a possible relationship between Hussein and al-Zarqawi. Bush said in June “Zarqawi’s the best evidence of connection to al-Qaeda affiliates and al-Qaeda.”

Former CIA director George Tenet in a speech last February said U.S. intelligence analysts did not view Iraq as an imminent threat prior to the war. 

Tenet in an October 2002 letter to Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote that Iraq was not sharing weapons of mass destruction with terrorists but “probably would become much less constrained” in conducting terrorism against the United States, and possibly use chemical or biological weapons. The letter also noted “growing indications of a relationship with al-Qaeda,” though apparently not a cooperative one.

A Sunday New York Times article said top nuclear weapons experts prior to the war had disputed a claim by Cheney and other top Bush administration officials that aluminum tubes Iraq attempted to purchase prior to the war were for building nuclear weapons. It said the administration often did not disclose that dissent from the public.

Edwards said Iran’s nuclear weapons program makes it “more dangerous today than they were four years ago” and called Tehran “the largest state sponsor of terrorism on the planet.”

Cheney said the administration has “made major progress in dealing here with a major issue with respect to nuclear proliferation, and we’ll continue to press very hard on the North Koreans and the Iranians as well.”

Cheney took issue with Kerry’s assertion last week that a U.S. president should justify an attack made in self-defense.

Kerry said a U.S. president has the right to a pre-emptive strike. He said, though, prior to such an attack the president should provide evidence to his country and the world that the strike is justified. The administration failed to do that, Kerry said.

“You’ve got to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons,” he said.

Customary international law for more than 100 years has required that states have evidence of an imminent threat to justify a pre-emptive attack in self-defense. The Bush administration has asserted that such evidence isn’t required — that the United States can attack a country before a threat develops, which would be a preventive rather than pre-emptive attack.

Cheney echoed charges by Republicans that Kerry at that debate had advocated allowing other countries to prevent use of U.S. force in self-defense.

“We heard Senator Kerry say the other night that there ought to be some kind of global test before U.S. troops are deployed pre-emptively to protect the United States,” he said. “That’s part of a track record that goes back to the 1970s when he ran for Congress the first time and said, ‘Troops should not be deployed without U.N. approval.’”  

Edwards said Cheney was being misleading in his characterization of Kerry’s policy, and Edwards said Kerry “will never give any country veto power over the security of the United States of America.”

Edwards said further that prior to a war, “We’re going to make sure that the American people know the truth about why we’re using force and what the explanation for it is. … We’re also going to make sure that we tell the world the truth because the reality is for America to lead, for America to do what it’s done for 50 years before this president and vice president came into office, it is critical that we be credible.”

Edwards did not fully articulate Kerry’s position, however, which is that a pre-emptive attack should be an option for a U.S. president but preventive war — against a threat for which there is no evidence of imminence — should not be contemplated.

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