The President and his most senior advisors systematically misrepresented the threat posed by Iraq to the United States in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. They made repeated, bald, incendiary claims that the American people now know are false and that they knew, at the time, were not supported by the evidence. In short, they lied.
They said: Iraq has WMD – weapons of mass destruction (that is, nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons programs.) They invoked visions of nuclear
“mushroom clouds.”
After months of combing through occupied Iraq, the CIA-commissioned team of 1,200 intelligent agents concluded that Iraq had no WMD after all, making a mockery of Administration exultant statements that “we know where the WMDs are” and that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.”[1]
Iraq’s Non-existent Nuclear Weapons Program
Iraq’s nuclear weapons program had been dismantled by international inspectors after the 1991 war. The Administration’s confident assertions that Iraq had rebuilt the program rested on two false claims that analysts inside and outside of the government publicly and privately refuted, and that even if true, did not add up to much of a case.
** First, the Administration claimed that Iraq has attempted to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium needed to fuel nuclear weapons. In fact, the nation’s leading enrichment experts, in the Department of Energy and independent physicists, unequivocally rejected this claim, as did the State Department’s intelligence analysts. DOE experts concluded out that the tubes in question were not suitable for enrichment centrifuges. State Department analysts noted that they matched precisely the materials and dimensions of an Iraqi rocket, and that Iraq had declared a stockpile of identical tubes to U.N. inspectors in 1996. [2] The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reached the same conclusion and cited the same irrefutable facts.[3]
** Second, the Administration claimed, in President Bush’s
2003 State of the Union address and on many other occasions, that Iraq sought
significant quantities of uranium from
Niger. In fact, CIA and State
Department analysts had alerted the White House long before the State of the
Union that the documentary evidence was weak (indeed, it was a crudely forged
letter) and the charge was not credible.[4] Former Amb. Joe Wilson had traveled to Niger
at the behest of the CIA in 2002 to investigate the claims and found them
groundless.[5] The IAEA recognized the document in question
as a forgery and dismissed the claim in its reports to the Security Council
prior to the start of the war.[6] When it became widely appreciated that
President Bush had made this obviously untrue claim in his most important
speech to the American public, he attempted to pass the buck onto his CIA
Director.
This was not a case of “everyone got it wrong.” The International Atomic Energy Agency resumed inspections in Iraq in November 2002 to look for evidence of a nuclear weapons program. After 237 inspections at 148 sites, including all those identified in overhead satellite imagery as having suspicious activity, Director General Mohamed ElBaradei reported to the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, that: “There is ‘no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq… Nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.”[7] Nor was it reasonable to have concluded that Iraq was successfully hiding its facilities. Nuclear weapons facilities tend to be large, expensive and dependant on imports – in other words, these facilities are very difficult to hide.
They said: Saddam Hussein has close ties to Al Qaeda
The Administration repeatedly invoked the 9/11 attacks and the “threat” from Iraq in the same sentence (and brazenly continues to do so). So successfully did the Administration mislead the country into believing that Iraq was somehow connected to the World Trade Center attacks that public opinion surveys at the time of the U.S. invasion revealed that over 50 percent of Americans believed Iraq was to blame.
President Bush and senior officials repeatedly and confidently claimed that Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda had a close working relationship. But they had no solid evidence of this; and none has ever been produced. The Administration pointed to rumors of possible meetings, of which the most oft-cited one proved to be false, and others that fell far short of evidence of a cooperative relationship, even if true. Newly declassified documents make clear that Administration statements on this issue were contrary to what U.S. intelligence officials believed to be true.[8] The high-level September 11th Commission concluded after an exhaustive study of all relevant classified and open material that there was no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. [9]
In fact, as Middle experts knew well, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein loathed and feared one another. Saddam’s secular rule and persecution of Islamists led Bin Laden to frequently call for the overthrow of this infidel and apostate and offer to go to battle against him after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
As of Tuesday, September 20, 2005, 1,902 American soldiers have died fighting in Iraq.[10] Another 14,479 have been wounded in action. Uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis have died.[11] The Pentagon pointedly refuses to keep track.
Footnotes
[1] Final Report of the Iraq Survey Group, “Comprehensive
Report of the Special Advisor to the DIA on Iraq’s WMD,” September 30, 2004,
available at
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol1_cover.htm.
David Kay, Testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, January 28, 2004, opening statement available at http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/28/kay.transcript.
[2] The State Department analysts strongly opposed the CIA’s position and included an atypical, blunt dissent in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. See Director of Central Intelligence, Key Judgments from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, October 2000. available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/2002/nie_iraq_october2002.htm.
[3] Jody Warrick, “U.S. Claim of Iraq Nuclear Program is Called into Question,” Washington Post, January 24, 2003.
[4] Dana Priest and Dana Milbank, “President Defends Allegation on Iraq,” Washington Post, July 15, 2003, p. A01. State Department dissent contained in 2002 NIE (see fn 2).
[5] Joseph C. Wilson, “What I didn’t find in Africa,” The New York Times, July 6, 2003. Joseph C. Wilson, Interview on NBC “Meet the Press,” October 5, 2003.
[6] Statement to the UN Security Council of the Director General of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, “The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: An Update.” March 7, 2003, New York. For complete statement, see http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n006.shtml.
[7] ElBaradei statement to the UN Security Council. (see fn
6).
[9] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report,” Washington, D.C., July 22, 2004, available at http://www.9-11commission.gov. For news story see “Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, “Al Qaeda Iraq connection is dismissed,” Washington Post, June 17, 2004, p. A01.
[10] Pentagon casualty report. Includes all casualties of U.S. service members that occurred on or after March 19, 2003 in connection with the Iraq war. See pentagon.mil/news/casualty.pdf.
[11] Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary from over 24,000 to around 100,000. The Iraq Body Count project provides a comprehensive, well-documented and sourced count of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq resulting directly from the invasion and occupation. See www.iraqbodycount.net.