WMD stockpiles in Iraq were never the core issue

It is a very good article that discusses why the US went to war with Iraq in the first place.  It never ceases to amaze me that two things about the on-line world always remain true: 1) How little people know about the facts of history and 2) How willing they are to go on-line and demonstrate this.

The United States and UK went into Iraq because it believed, correctly so, that Iraq was a serious threat to the region and to the US/UK. The Kay report has been reported very selectively. What it actually says includes three  things but only one has been widely reported:

1) No weapons of mass destruction have yet been found and it is increasingly likely that none will be found.

and the part left out that should be mentioned:

2) Saddam thought he had weapons of mass destruction. His generals thought he had weapons of mass destruction. Due to internal corruption, money that was being spent to create weapons of mass destruction were diverted to other things.

3) The general strategy Saddam was going towards was to not create stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction but rather prepare the way to be able to produce them in quantity once the sanctions were lifted. That is, not have a smoking gun but get everything in place to flip a switch once the heat was off.

It is items 2 and 3 that should be remembered and yet are overlooked by the media (and amazingly there are still some people who claim there is no bias in the media).   The United States was attacked on 9/11. It was the most severe attack by a foreign entity against the United States since 1812.  The US is at war.  Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 directly. But that's totally irrelevant. In a post-9/11 world Saddam couldn't be allowed to stick around. The UN believed he still had weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence services from every major country thought he had WMD.  And why not? Iraq said that they had them too. When Iraq tossed out the inspectors in 1998, there were still tons of WMD unaccounted for.  Iraq refused to account for those weapons and hoped to play the stall game in the hopes that France and Russia would again take the position that sanctions should be lifted.  The people who were against the war are still against the war. The people in favor of military action are still glad we did it. Not finding WMD is completely irrelevant because a) it wasn't up to us to prove he had WMD. and His current possession of WMD was irrelevant.

But don't take my word for it. Here is something former President Clinton had to say this past year.

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions."

Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend the reports. For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times within just 14 months, and it has submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM.

In 1995 Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law and the chief organizer of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more. Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of weapons in significant quantities--and weapons stocks. Previously it had vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam's son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth.

Now listen to this: What did it admit? It admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production. . . .

Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door, and our people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it. . . .

Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits, including, I might add, one palace in Baghdad more than 2,600 acres large. . . .

One of these presidential sites is about the size of Washington, D.C. . . .

It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons. . . .

Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal. . . . In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now--a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

If we fail to respond today, Saddam, and all those who would follow in his footsteps, will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations Security Council, and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction program.

-Bill Clinton