Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Last August, Bush said Saddam merely "desired" weapons of mass destruction. A month later, as he began selling the Iraq war, his tone suddenly changed.
Jun 18, 2003 | After touring the Andrea Foods pasta factory Monday in Orange, N.J., President Bush spoke to Garden State business owners at the Wyndham Newark Airport Hotel, where he decried the "revisionist historians" who seemed to be questioning whether "Hussein was a threat to America and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003," the president said.
"He continually ignored the demands of the free world, so the United States and friends and allies acted." One thing was certain, Bush said to applause, "Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States and our friends and allies."
A nonpartisan analysis of who, exactly, has been a "revisionist" on the subject of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, however, reveals that politicians from both parties have revised their positions -- and often more than once. Both Democrats and Republicans have displayed a constantly shifting rhetorical pattern that makes it impossible to figure out what, if anything, either side ever concretely knew about Saddam's weapons programs.
The one consistency: Their statements, miraculously, always seemed to fit their political agenda.
Though a minority in the United States seems to care if WMD are ever actually discovered -- regardless of the White House's assurance, as spokesman Ari Fleischer declared in April, that WMD were "what this war was about" -- it has greater resonance in the world at large. Most Americans seem pleased enough that a brutal tyrant like Saddam has been toppled, despite much confusion among the public as to what role Saddam played in 9/11, with 44 percent of those polled by Knight Ridder in January stating that "most" or "some" of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi. The international community is not of the same opinion, and Bush allies and opponents alike have criticized the administration for overstating the urgency of the threat. Congressional hearings will soon be underway in Washington to examine this question, because there was certainly an escalation in terms of what the administration said that it knew, month by month, throughout 2002. Whether that escalation was based on new and possibly shoddy intelligence data, or the political needs at the time, is a matter for the committees to resolve.
Before the war, though, it wasn't just the Bush administration flogging the WMD menace. "We know that [Saddam] has chemical and biological weapons today, that he's used them in the past, and that he's doing everything he can to build more," presidential aspirant Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Oct. 7, 2002. "Every day he gets closer to his long-term goal of nuclear capability. We cannot allow Saddam Hussein to have nuclear weapons." There was an urgency to Edwards' call; on the Senate floor on Sept. 12, Edwards said that Saddam's nuclear capability "could be less than a year away."
Edwards at the time was trying to shore up some bona fides, his good looks and Southern demographic appeal already a given. Edwards is always quick to remind listeners of his membership in the Senate Intelligence Committee. But since the fall of Baghdad -- particularly when campaigning for the would-be Iowa primary voters, many of whom opposed the war -- Edwards has been more discreet. Speaking to lefty Democratic activists in Iowa at the end of May, Edwards said, according to the Des Moines Register, that when it comes to the missing WMD, he believes "people in this country are entitled to an explanation. Do we have intelligence information that is inaccurate? Was there a distortion of information?" In an interview with the newspaper he sounded like a rube fresh from the used-car lot, upset about the Pinto he was hoodwinked into buying. "I listened to our intelligence operatives tell us over a long period of time about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he said.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., has also found himself questioning the Bush administration for taking the same position he himself has long held. In October 1998, Lieberman reported on the "chilling news from Baghdad." With the inspections program "disintegrating," Lieberman said, it would only be three months after inspections ended that Saddam would "begin building missiles to carry the weapons of mass destruction we know he still has, and he will surely restart or finish his nuclear weapons program." Introducing the Iraq War Resolution on Oct. 2, 2002, Lieberman declared that Saddam "has continued, without question, to develop weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them on distant targets."
But a few months later, Lieberman sounded as though he did have a question or two.
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