So now we find out quietly — as if the power that be are ashamed and hope people won’t notice — that the adminstration has abandoned the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
What is clear is this: the end of the search was not trumpeted because this administration wanted minimum publicity for the end of a search that we were told was a KEY REASON for us going to war:
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.
Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG’s final conclusions and will be published this spring.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.
Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.
This throws a monkey-wrench into future use of the doctrine of pre-emptive war. If no weapons are ever found, it’s logical that it’s then OK for future American administrations (and presumably since this is our policy, for Vladimir Putin and other leaders of other nations) to go war if there are not clear-and-present-danger compelling reasons to do so.
But there was no major press conference on this point — no major White House policy statement, even one outlining the other reasons for going to war. And — most certainly — no one fired over this massive intelligence screw up.
Just a quiet news story in the Washington Post…
Will Congressional leaders and all but the administration’s biggest backers give this administration the benefit of the doubt next time? PERHAPS…but pre-emptive war will take alot more convincing next time. A lot.
UPDATE: There’s a lot of reaction in Blogtopia, One of the blunter comments comes from Andrew Quinn:
The American administration based their Iraqi invasion upon false evidence. People are saying Dan Rather needs to be fired because he went to press and then defended his story that was based upon false information. If you really believe that, then you must (hypocrites excluded) therefore believe that Bush’s impeachment is necessary and impending. Bush should be held at least as responsible for the nation’s Armed Forces as Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes programs.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.