The hyping of Saddam's WMD

Campaigning in Iowa earlier this month, Lieberman asked whether intelligence agencies "had it right or whether the administration was overstating the case" about Iraqi WMD. "Those questions ought to be answered, because America's credibility is on the line," he said.

Down the street, at the White House, the shift in rhetoric has been a mirror image of Lieberman and Edwards' journey from conviction to circumspection. Indeed, the Bush administration's evolution of rhetoric from the beginning to the end of 2002 is nothing short of remarkable.

First, there was a shift from carefully describing what the administration thought Saddam might have, to firm declarations that Saddam had WMD. Then came an arms buildup: The claims of what Saddam allegedly had started with chemical, then went to biological, and then nuclear, weapons.

Ending the regime of Saddam Hussein had been a dream for various hawks in the Bush administration long before Inauguration Day 2001, of course. Indeed, many in the administration of the president's father, George H.W. Bush, thought it a mistake to have refrained from doing so at the conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991. But it wasn't until the horrors of 9/11 that the idea really began to gain serious traction within the administration of George W. Bush, more than a decade later. The World Trade Center and the Pentagon sites were still smoldering when, the day after the attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested attacking Iraq. "Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaida?" Rumsfeld asked, according to Bob Woodward's "Bush at War."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, meanwhile, told the president that there was anywhere from a 10 percent to 50 percent chance that Iraq was involved in 9/11. After much internal debate on the matter, Bush decided that the focus needed to be on al-Qaida and Afghanistan.

Bush declared, according to Woodward, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this point." In his well-received Sept. 20, 2001, address to the joint session of Congress, Bush's only mention of Iraq was to contrast the pending war on terror and its ambiguities with the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan came and went, and by the time of his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush was laying out a case against Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the "axis of evil." But the case against Saddam that the president laid out that evening was relatively modest. The charges against Iraq were that it flaunted its hostility toward the United States, "support[ed] terror," and had used poison gas against the Kurds more than a decade earlier. Regarding WMD, all Bush said was that the regime had "plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons" -- not that it had them. Bush noted, ominously, that Saddam had kicked out United Nations arms inspectors and thus was "a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world."

Other matters held the president's attention throughout the early part of 2002: corporate scandals, the continued hunt for Osama bin Laden, cracking down on al-Qaida, and the flagging economy. Internal debates may have been waged behind closed doors at the White House and in the Pentagon, but the administration was generally fairly reticent on the matter.

A chronological analysis of Bush administration statements from early 2002 until the war began in March 2003 reveals a stark ramp-up in rhetoric.

March 21, 2002: After Cheney returned from a 10-day swing through the Middle East -- where he tried, but failed, to secure commitments from nine Arab nations to support military action against Iraq -- he told reporters that the leaders were nonetheless "uniformly concerned about the situation in Iraq." The issue of WMD was a primary reason for this concern, he said, but not because Iraq clearly and unequivocally possessed WMD.

Like the United States, Cheney said, the nine Arab nations were concerned because they had seen "the work that [Saddam] has done to develop chemical and biological weapons" as well as "his pursuit of nuclear weapons."

But what Saddam actually possessed was unknown.

Cheney also referred to Saddam's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds prior to the first Gulf War, in 1988. In what must stand as the only time in United States history that a Republican vice president urged reporters to read that week's New Yorker, Cheney referred to writer Jeffrey Goldberg's "devastating piece" on the chemical attacks, which had killed thousands of Kurds.

One day later, at a joint press conference with Mexican President Vicente Fox in Mexico, the president continued with the administration's talking points, saying that Saddam was "a man who refuses to allow us to determine whether he has weapons of mass destruction, which leads me to believe he does."

Three months later the administration's cautious tone changed abruptly.

Next Page: Suddenly, concerns over chemical, biological and nuclear weapons

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