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Editor's Note | For context and background; on the White
House's own website entitled 'Disarm
Saddam Hussein,' the administration lists the reasons it gave to Congress,
the American people and the United Nations to justify a war in Iraq: "26,000
liters of anthrax -- enough to kill several million people; 38,000 liters of
botulinum toxin; 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents; Almost 30,000
munitions capable of delivering chemical agents; several mobile biological
weapons labs; that he recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa; and al-Qaida members." Nothing of this terrible arsenal has been found.
The 'mobile weapons labs' were weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the
British in the 1980s. The Niger uranium claims have been so thoroughly
discredited here in America and worldwide that it is amazing the claim remains
on the official White House page. - wrp/ma
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
By
Michael Dobbs
The Washington Post
Friday 12 September 2003
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein,
Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that
Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason
for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to
congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to
stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct
government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest
of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle
between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
Wolfowitz is by no means alone. Since the fall of Baghdad five
months ago, senior administration officials from President Bush downward have
been reinventing the rationale for war. In his television address Sunday night,
Bush barely mentioned Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs.
Instead, he described Iraq as "the central front" in the war on terror, the site
of a desperate last stand by the "enemies of freedom," who include former
Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists.
Even opponents of the war acknowledge that now that the United
States is in Iraq, it cannot afford to fail, in effect conceding that the
invasion has created its own justification. There is broad agreement across the
political spectrum that a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops would destabilize
the entire region and undermine U.S. credibility.
Congressional critics of Bush's policy suspect that the new
administration line on winning the peace is designed to distract attention from
the failure to find evidence of Hussein's biological, chemical or nuclear
weapons programs. When Wolfowitz appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee at the end of July to share impressions from a visit to Iraq, he was
chided by Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.) for skirting the issue of weapons of
mass destruction.
"I don't think [Wolfowitz and other administration officials] are
being forthright," said Chafee, the sole Republican senator to vote against the
war. "They are using whatever argument is most marketable at any given
time."
In a telephone interview Saturday, Wolfowitz denied that the
administration is providing different justifications for the war with Iraq. He
said he and other administration officials had been "clear from the beginning"
that there were three arguments for invading Iraq: halting the development of
weapons of mass destruction, liberating the country from "a terrible tyranny,"
and creating a democratic model that would serve as an inspiration for the rest
of the Middle East.
"I was often criticized for talking too much about what Iraq
could become when it was liberated, and I believed it has to become," Wolfowitz
said. "We have to win [this war], and when we win it, I believe it will advance
American interests."
While it is true that Wolfowitz has long advocated a free and
democratic Iraq, an examination of his speeches before and after the war
nevertheless reveals a clear shift of emphasis away from the focus on weapons of
mass destruction as the primary reason for going to war. During the run-up to
the war, Wolfowitz argued that "disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological
weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning
the war on terror."
"This is not a game; it is deadly serious," he told the Council
on Foreign Relations in January, in a speech aimed at convincing the country's
foreign policy elite of the case for war. "We are dealing with a threat to the
security of our nation and the world."
More recently, on "The Charlie Rose Show" on PBS, Wolfowitz
poured cold water on the why-did-we-go-to-war debate in the United States. "
'Why are you Americans so obsessed about weapons of mass destruction?' " he
quoted Iraqis as asking him during his visit to Iraq. " 'Saddam Hussein was
[himself] a weapon of mass destruction. The damage that he did to our country
was a weapon of mass destruction.' "
A 1,200-strong team from the Defense Intelligence Agency has been
scouring the country for evidence of chemical weapons for the past two
months.
"There's no question that the administration has shifted its
ground" on the reasons for war, said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the
Council on Foreign Relations and a supporter of the war. "They have gone from
Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction and a hint of his connections
to al Qaeda to making the Middle East safe for democracy and getting rid of the
tyrant."
Walter Russell Mead, another council member who listened to
Wolfowitz's presentation in January, said the administration had made a mistake
by deciding to make Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction the
centerpiece of the case for war. He said there were stronger arguments for
invading Iraq, including the long-term political and economic costs of
containing Hussein in the decade that followed the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
"The administration should have argued that a root cause of much
of the terrorism in the Middle East was the political instability caused by
Saddam Hussein," said Mead, who referred to the need to keep tens of thousands
of U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to deter Hussein from further
adventures such as the invasion of Kuwait. "I think the administration is making
a better case now. I wish they had made it at the time."
Mead and other analysts noted that the U.S. military presence in
Saudi Arabia is a core grievance of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist
organization. Hussein's overthrow has enabled the United States to close down
its operations at the Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh, the Saudi
capital.
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