Abstract

THE BLAME GAME

The author argues that, contrary to the claims of the Bush administration, there was substantial intelligence prior to the war in Iraq indicating that the country had no weapons of mass destruction. "We were all wrong." David Kay, the recently resigned chief WMD hunter who has declared that it is unlikely Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction in the years before the war, uttered these words while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28. But Kay was incorrect. Not everybody was mistaken on the question of Iraq's WMDs. Not UN inspectors, including Hans Blix, who worried about Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities but questioned whether discrepancies in Iraq's accounting meant stockpiles existed. Not US intelligence analysts who argued that critical pieces of evidence were not solid. It was Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and other aides who missed the mark. Administration officials and other war backers have pointed to an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to justify their prewar statements about Iraq's unconventional weapons. In an October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Bush said Iraq had a "massive stockpile of biological weapons." The NIE said no such thing. Regarding chemical weapons, Powell said in his February 2003 UN speech the Administration's "conservative estimate" was that Saddam possessed 100 to 500 tons of "chemical weapons agent." The flawed NIE had not been as definitive. Bush and Cheney were particularly brazen when they declared that Saddam was revving up efforts to develop a nuclear bomb.