Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The Dems and the U.S. public may meekly accept the administration's ever-changing answers about Saddam's alleged weapons. But our foreign allies don't -- and the more the White House spins, the angrier they get.
May 30, 2003 | Democratic Party officials, with few exceptions, seem unconcerned with the fact that the U.S. government has not yet been able to locate any direct evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the declared reason for the war. But that fact is not going unnoticed by opposition parties in other countries whose leaders are allied with President Bush, especially in light of comments made Tuesday night by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowing that WMD may never be found, which is an apparent contradiction to previous administration remarks on the subject.
Polls indicate that the American people care little that such discoveries have not been made. Bush administration officials thus continue to act as if none of this is an issue, while moving on to focus on other conflicts, like Iran and the Israel-Palestine peace process. But in nations allied with the U.S. -- from Australia to Denmark to Ireland to the U.K. -- opponents of the war are using Rumsfeld's remarks about the MIA WMD as evidence of duplicity by the Bush administration. It all creates a sort of parallel-universe feel, where other men in far-off lands suffer recriminations because of remarks made here.
On Tuesday night, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was flying to Kuwait to thank British troops for their war efforts when Rumsfeld was telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that "it is also possible that [Iraqi leaders] decided that they would destroy [the WMD] prior to a conflict. We don't know what happened."
In the U.S. the comments seemed just part of a rolled-out talking points plan for Bush administration officials to back off their declared confidence that they would discover WMD, what White House spokesman Ari Fleischer referred to in April as "what this war was about." And there seemed little likelihood of recrimination from the American people, 41 percent of whom -- according to a recent poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes -- believe or are unsure about whether the U.S. has already found WMD in Iraq. Moreover, according to a Fox News/Opinion dynamics poll from late May, 82 percent of the American people think that any WMD have been moved or destroyed, while only 10 percent think that there were no weapons to begin with. But abroad, Rumsfeld's remarks and those like them have been pounded upon by war opponents in countries that helped the U.S. fight the war.
Further doubts about pending WMD discoveries -- fueled by Bush officials themselves -- have bubbled to the surface at an awkward time, and not just because of Blair taking his Basra victory lap. On Wednesday, CBS News reported that Col. Tim Madere, an unconventional-weapons specialist with the Army's V Corp, disputed U.S. intelligence claims about the site U.S. intelligence called Saddam's bunker on the night of March 20, thus launching an early attack with 40 Tomahawk missiles. "We looked real hard," Madere said. "We didn't find any bodies or bunkers." On Thursday, the BBC reported that members of British intelligence had serious questions about a dossier from Blair's office claiming that Iraq could launch a WMD attack with only 45 minutes' notice.
Since the Iraq war began and no evidence was immediately found to back up Vice President Dick Cheney's Aug. 26 pronouncement that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the administration has been back-pedaling. In his April interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, for instance, President Bush lowered the bar, indicating that the U.S. was looking for evidence not of the weapons themselves but that despot Saddam Hussein "had a weapons of mass destruction program." The same day as the Brokaw interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that "whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."
This has sufficed for those like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., of the alleged opposition party, who told NBC on May 11 that he doesn't think the failure to find WMD would be damaging to U.S. credibility. "I think we've got to recognize that there were more than one goal here," Daschle said, as if reading from White House talking points. "One of the other goals was to remove a threat to this country, to remove a threat to the region, to remove a person who not only repressed and tortured his own people but clearly posed some serious problems throughout the world."
