President Assails Iraq War Skeptics
Prewar Intelligence Record Defended
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 18, 2003; Page A13
President Bush expressed escalating impatience yesterday with skeptics of his claims about Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, setting a confrontational tone for an upcoming congressional inquiry.
For the second day in a row, Bush assailed what he has called second-guessing from Capitol Hill and abroad now that U.S. troops have had control of Iraq for more than two months but have found no weapons of mass destruction. As Bush built support for the war, he repeatedly asserted that those weapons posed a threat to the United States.
Bush, in remarks at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, did not refer to Hussein by name but instead called him "the dictator in Iraq."
"I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain," Bush said. "He is no longer a threat to the Free World, and the people of Iraq are free."
On Monday, Bush made a similar complaint during remarks in Elizabeth, N.J.
"There are some who would like to rewrite history -- revisionist historians is what I like to call them," he said. "Saddam Hussein was a threat to America and the Free World in '91, in '98, in 2003. He continually ignored the demands of the Free World, so the United States and friends and allies acted."
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence plans to begin hearings this week on the intelligence underlying the administration's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability. The chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), has said that policymakers will be interviewed during closed hearings and that committee members have begun reviewing documents from the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the government. Roberts said the committee will likely produce a public and a classified report.
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer continued to vigorously defend Bush's prewar warnings under lengthy questioning at his televised briefing, and stated flatly that the White House still believes weapons of mass destruction will be found. "The president is patient, and he understands the American people are patient, as well," he said.
Fleischer also said Bush continues to believe Hussein had such weapons immediately prior to the war. "That's what the president said then; it's what he believes now, of course," he said. Fleischer called it "fanciful" and "a fit of imagination" to suggest that after U.N. weapons inspectors departed in 1998, Hussein "used the fact that the inspectors were gone to destroy his weapons."
The administration case is not based entirely on direct evidence. Fleischer said that "the decision to go to war was based on the knowledge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein had a history of using weapons of mass destruction." He said the intelligence about the lack of evidence that any weapons were destroyed "led to the conclusion of this administration, the previous administration and many on the Hill that Saddam Hussein did indeed have weapons of mass destruction."
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said yesterday on ABC's "Good Morning America" that the frustration involved in searching for weapons of mass destruction reflects Hussein's history of "denying and deceiving every country around the world, the United Nations, intel agency after intel agency."
"It's going to take some time," she said. "But we'll get there."
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