The Bush Administration acted on the basis of intelligence conclusions that were widely shared by previous administrations and foreign governments. President Bush was not the first American president to emphasize the long-term threat posed by Iraq. President Bill Clinton justified Operation Desert Fox, a three-day U.S. air offensive against Iraq, by invoking the threat posed by Iraqi WMD on December 16, 1998:
Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. And mark my words he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.
Clinton’s National Security Council advisor Sandy Berger warned of Saddam’s threat in 1998, "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” Former Vice PresidentAl Gore said in 2002, "We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." CIA Director George Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton Administration, declared that the presence of Iraqi WMD was a “slam dunk.” (For more on the political campaign to paint intelligence mistakes as conscious lies, see Norman Podhoretz’s excellent article, “Who Is Lying About Iraq?,” in the December issue of Commentary.)
The intelligence services of Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Israel, among many others, held the same opinion. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin explained his concerns to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003: "Right now, our attention has to be focused as a priority on the biological and chemical domains. It is there that our presumptions about Iraq are the most significant. Regarding the chemical domain, we have evidence of its capacity to produce VX and Yperite. In the biological domain, the evidence suggests the possible possession of significant stocks of anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly a production capability." The German Ambassador to the United States, Wolfgang Ischinger, said on NBC’s “Today” of February 26, 2003, "I think all of our governments believe that Iraq has produced weapons of mass destruction and that we have to assume that they still have—that they continue to have weapons of mass destruction.”
The Bush Administration may have been wrong about Iraqi WMD, but so were many other governments, few of which have been accused of lying. Moreover, three independent commissions have found that there is no evidence that the Bush Administration exaggerated the intelligence about Iraqi WMD.
In July 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report with the following conclusions:
Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. …
Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President's visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.[1]
In March 2005, the bipartisan Robb-Silverman commission reached the same conclusion:
The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.[2]
The July 2004 Butler Report, issued by a special panel set up by the British Parliament, found that the famous “16 words” in President Bush’s January 28, 2003, State of the Union address were based on fact, contrary to the claims of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who has alleged that Bush’s assertion was a lie. Bush said, “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The Butler report called Bush’s 16 words “well founded.” The report also made clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes after the President spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence that he cited or the CIA’s conclusion that Iraq was seeking to obtain uranium.
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