Editorial: Yet another blow to war’s justification

Friday, Oct. 8, 2004 | 8:54 a.m.

The only really surprising aspect of the report by Charles Duelfer, the United States' chief weapons inspector in Iraq, is that the Republican leadership in Congress allowed it to be released before the election. The report, released Wednesday, concludes definitively that the Bush administration's pivotal reason for invading Iraq -- because Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- had no basis in fact.

President Bush's assertions on this point began to unravel even before the invasion, when U.N. teams of weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei announced that Saddam had no WMD. Further unraveling occurred shortly after the fall of Baghdad. Weeks went by and American forces came up empty-handed in their search for chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

The United States and England then put together a force of 1,700 weapons experts, known as the Iraq Survey Group, and scoured the country. Still nothing. On Jan. 23 of this year, the head of the group, David Kay, resigned in discouragement. He predicted then that no weapons would ever be found. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he lamented the faulty U.S. intelligence that Bush used to justify the war. "We were all wrong and that is most disturbing," he testified.

Duelfer, a special adviser to the director of the CIA, was named by then-CIA Director George Tenet as Kay's replacement. He continued the work and produced the three-volume, 918-page report that was released Wednesday. The report is solid documentation that Saddam Hussein represented no external threat whatsoever. Any WMD that Iraq had were destroyed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and no new programs were under way to again produce or stockpile such weapons, the report concluded.

The report does infer that Saddam wanted U.S. sanctions lifted so that he could again acquire WMD, although it acknowledges no written strategy for such a course could be found. But Bush was saying, with relentless and reckless certainty, that Saddam in fact had the weapons now and was a threat to use them against the free world. Bush and his senior staff also alleged Saddam had a working relationship with al-Qaida, and that hasn't panned out either.

An inquiry is under way to determine how the U.S. intelligence services could have provided Bush with so much faulty speculation about Iraq. We believe the American people should begin another line of inquiry: Why was Bush so inclined to believe the intelligence services when there was no proof of anything they were saying?