Sunday, Jun. 01, 2003
Weapons of Mass Disappearance
The war in Iraq was based largely on intelligence about banned arms that still haven't been found. Was America's spy craft wrong — or manipulated?
By MICHAEL DUFFY
How do take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? You could subcontract with another nation, fight on the sly and hope no one notices. But if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason — something to stir up the folks back home.
As the U.S. prepared to go to war in Iraq last winter, the most compelling reason advanced by George W. Bush to justify a new kind of pre-emptive war was that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological arms — weapons of mass destruction (wmd). "There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in January. "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," said Vice President Dick Cheney in March. That Iraq might have WMD was never the only reason the Bush Administration wanted to topple Saddam. But it was the big reason, the casus belli, the public rationale peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies and a hostile United Nations to get behind the controversial invasion. And while that sales pitch fell flat overseas, it worked better than expected at home: by late March, 77% of the public felt that invading U.S. troops would find WMD.
But eight weeks after the war's end, most of that confident intelligence has yet to pan out, and a growing number of experts think it never will. Current and former U.S. officials have begun to question whether the weapons will ever be found in anything like the quantities the U.S. suggested before the war — if found at all — and whether the U.S. gamed the intelligence to justify the invasion. For now, WMD seems to stand for weapons of mass disappearance. Smarting from the accusations that they had cooked the books, top U.S. officials fanned out late last week to say the hunt would go on and the weapons would eventually be found. CIA officials told TIME that they would produce a round of fresh evidence for increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week. After dispatching dozens of G.I. patrols to some 300 suspected WMD sites in Iraq over the past two months, only to come up empty-handed, the Pentagon announced last week that it will shift from hunting for banned weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able to say where banned weapons are — or were. But it is clear that the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieut. General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply not there."
For full article go to: http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0%2C8816%2C455767%2C00.html