Word: wmd
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...Iraq war further revealed how little Bush learned from September 11. The president now blames his flawed rationale for the war on bad intelligence, but the “WMD-that-weren’t” fiasco was the second major intelligence failure on his watch. The crucial lesson of 9/11 was that U.S. intelligence needed to be overhauled immediately, before another intelligence flaw imperiled American lives. Bush failed that leadership test with catastrophic results...
...rule. The exhaustive detail compiled by the report's author, Charles Duelfer, chief U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s and the Bush Administration's top hunter since January, richly fills in the previous portrait of a paranoid and brutal dictator who believed that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the prime tools with which to advance his extravagant ambitions. Drawn from lengthy interrogations of the core Iraqi leadership and Saddam during their months in U.S. custody, the Duelfer report sheds fresh light on the dictator's inner motivations and artful deceptions...
Saddam was awed by science and impressed by the way technology conveyed military power. To him, WMD were a telling symbol of strength and modernity, and he thought any country that could develop them had an intrinsic right to do so. In his experience, through 25 years and two wars, WMD had also saved his neck. In the 1980s war with Iran, he concluded that chemical shells had repelled the enemy's human-wave attacks and that ballistic missiles had broken the will of its leaders. He was convinced that his readiness to use WMD during the Gulf...
...spring of 1991, Saddam faced a critical decision. Though defeated on the battlefield, he had kept stocks of WMD squirreled away and maintained secret development programs. Now he faced tough postwar U.N. sanctions that would cripple Iraq unless he got rid of the WMD. Saddam made a calculated decision, says the report, that getting out from under sanctions was of paramount importance. He opted for a "tactical retreat" by ordering the elimination of what he had left: all biological, chemical and nuclear programs were abandoned, stockpiles destroyed. The vast array of evidence uncovered to date shows that when...
...greatest mystery, though, was his long game of deception: if Saddam had destroyed his WMD to escape from sanctions, why did he work so hard from 1991 until he was overthrown in 2003 to perpetuate the belief he still had them? The reason, suggests Duelfer, lay in how he saw the "survival of himself, his regime and his legacy." While the U.S. was fixated on Saddam's threat, he focused on his strategies for Iran and considered WMD essential to keeping his neighbor in check. So he was driven by what the report calls "a difficult balancing act": getting...