Bush and Rice Insist on Prewar Iraqi Threat Despite ISG Report

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Senior Bush administration officials in recent weeks have continued to suggest that Iraq could have threatened the United States with weapons of mass destruction, despite conclusions by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group that the country did not have such weapons, nor intended to use any against the United States (see GSN, Jan. 18).

How officials are characterizing the threat, however, appears to have changed.

While administration officials previously said Iraq had or sought weapons of mass destruction in order to commit aggression, they now say that an Iraqi threat stemmed from the former regime and its leader’s brutal nature — paralleling President George W. Bush’s statements in his inauguration address last week that “tyranny” is the greatest threat facing the United States today.

“The removal of [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein has made America safer because a dictator, a tyrant, a thug, with whom we had been at war in the past, who was destabilizing a vital part of the world, who was paying the families of suicide bombers, is no longer in power. And he no longer has the capacity to reconstitute a weapons program,” Bush said in an interview with ABC News reporter Barbara Walters that aired Jan. 14.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice concurred during her preconfirmation hearing for secretary of state last week.

“It was case that, yes, that the threat that this horrible dictator sitting in the Middle East, in the world’s most dangerous region, with whom we had gone to war … before, who had used weapons of mass destruction, who was shooting at our aircraft, that it was not acceptable to have him with weapons of mass destruction,” Rice said.

“We weren’t prepared to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt, given his history and given the shadow of the future,” she said.

The Iraq Survey Group, which pulled out of Iraq last month, concluded in its most recently released report that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, nor active programs or even written plans to develop and build nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Moreover, the report, titled “Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s WMD,” found that Hussein had no intention of attacking the United States or its allies with nonconventional weapons and that Hussein had desired them for defense — mainly to balance suspected Iranian banned-weapons capabilities.

While Hussein intended “to preserve Iraq’s intellectual capital for WMD,” the report said, “Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy,” and to a lesser degree “a wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations.”

Hussein viewed such weapons primarily as a means of ensuring the regime’s survival, it said.

“In Saddam’s view, WMD helped to save the Regime multiple times,” it said, citing chemical weapons used during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war to halt Iranian ground offensives, a belief the WMD threat had prevented U.S. forces from pushing to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War, and the suspected use of chemical weapons against revolting Shiite Iraqis in 1991.

The report’s conclusions were based on interviews with former Iraqi regime officials who said the United States was not a target.

“Saddam did not consider the United States a natural adversary, as he did Iran and Israel, and he hoped that Iraq might again enjoy improved relations with the United States, according to Tariq Aziz and the presidential secretary,” it said.

Iraq did not come clean about destroying its weapons as required by the United Nations, the report said, because Hussein hoped to maintain a deterrent against Iran and did not believe the United States would attack.

“Even if Saddam had some intention of restarting his banned weapon programs in the future, all the evidence indicates that his concern was his domestic opposition and regional adversaries — most importantly, Iran,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“There is just no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that Saddam was a serious threat, a growing threat or an uncertain threat,” he said.

Democratic senators last week pressed Rice to concede an error on the decision to invade. An admission of error on invading Iraq, however, might undermine support for the Iraq war, as well as for any future application of the administration’s preventive war doctrine, which holds that the United States may attack a country to prevent it from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, out of suspicion the weapons would be shared with terrorists, according to critics.

“An admission they were wrong … would undermine support for taking other actions, for example against Iran,” Cirincione said (see related GSN story, today).

Administration officials prior to the war had argued that Iraq possessed banned weapons and intended to attack the United States or its interests with them.  

When Bush first publicly made a case for preventive war in his 2002 State of the Union address he said that “rogue” states such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea were acquiring such weapons in order to commit aggression.

“Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.  Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th.  But we know their true nature,” he said in the 2002 address.

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he said.  

A key White House document, the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, made a similar claim. 

“In the 1990s we witnessed the emergence of a small number of rogue states that, while different in important ways, share a number of attributes. These states … are determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction, along with other advanced military technology, to be used as threats or offensively to achieve the aggressive designs of these regimes,” it said.

“We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends,” it said.

In a key speech just before the war began, Bush again suggested that Hussein sought unconventional weapons for aggression.

“In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth,” he said.

The speech also argued, as officials had previously, that a conspiracy to attack with unconventional weapons can be difficult to detect.

“Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations — and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now,” Bush said.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with PBS on Jan. 19, said the Sept. 11 attacks made officials more aware of the threat.

“Sept. 11 came along, and suddenly we had to think about the possibility of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists with a completely different assessment of risks,” he said.

Critics have charged, however, that the administration made an unwarranted leap of logic following the Sept. 11 attacks regarding that possibility. 

That Islamic terrorists attacked the United States using hijacked airplanes as missiles, they said, does not indicate that countries including Iraq, then with a secular government and apparently no ties to the strikes, would have shared weapons of mass destruction with a terrorist group to attack the United States and risk annihilation if discovered.

The attacks produced a U.S. reaction “that did not necessarily have a direct, logical connection to what had taken place,” Milton Leitenberg, an arms-control expert at the University of Maryland, wrote in 2002.

Critics contend the Duelfer report findings have undermined the preventive war argument. “Whatever the Hussein regime once had is gone because the international community insisted. It was all destroyed a decade ago, under world pressure,” the New York Times said in a Jan. 13 editorial.

“This is not a lesson that many people in power in Washington are prepared to carry away, but it is what the national adventure in the reckless doctrine of preventive warfare has to teach us,” it said.

The administration’s recent, more general focus on the nature of regimes as a source of threat may be a result of that, Crowley said.

“Once argument A has been disproved, you go to argument B and go to argument C and each time you’ve recast the adversary in larger terms and now what we’ve seen with the inauguration is literally something taken to its extreme,” he said.

Tyranny and oppression are at the roots of the gravest U.S. security threats today and must be eliminated, Bush said in his second inaugural address last week.

“We have seen our vulnerability — and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat,” he said.

“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion,” he said. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

Cirincione said he suspects Bush’s emphasis on tyranny and oppression, rather than as previously on unconventional weapons possession or suspected intent to use them, is an attempt to argue a new justification for attacking countries such as Iran, which is suspected of developing nuclear weapons.

“They are laying the case for military action against Iran and there’s no proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. What you have are the same kinds of assumptions and suspicions that swirled around Iraq and the conviction among the administration that they know what the Iranians are up to,” he said.

Such an emphasis on eliminating tyrannical regimes would undermine efforts to negotiate Iranian and North Korean disarmament, he said.

“You cannot negotiate the disarmament of a nation if your avowed goal is to overthrow the government of that nation,” he said.

Unidentified White House officials, however, have reportedly said that that the speech did not indicate a policy change. 

Bush’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, said the speech should not be interpreted by foreign governments and the American people as a prelude to a more aggressive and bellicose foreign policy in his second term, according to an Associated Press story on Saturday.

William Kristol, writing in the Jan. 31 issue of The Weekly Standard, wrote the speech may herald a new approach to policy.

Of so-called “outlaw regimes, he wrote, “for those nations we intend to promote regime change — primarily through peaceful means, but not ruling out military force in the case of threats to us.”

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.