Word: wmd
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...summer, frequent power cuts made life unbearable for millions, while the flow of oil, which the Administration had hoped would fund Iraq's reconstruction, was, on some days, less than half what it had been before the war. And despite five months of searching, the weapons of mass destruction (WMD), whose possession by Saddam Hussein had been the principal reason advanced by Bush for the war, are still nowhere to be found. "There are challenges greater than we anticipated," said a White House official last week, while insisting "In time, the benefits of our actions will be quite obvious...
...going to come up with." Members of Bush's senior national security team, says this official, "are as surprised as anyone--they really thought that it would be a lot easier to find, identify and show the world everything that was there." Iraqi sources involved in Saddam's WMD programs, meanwhile, insist that there was nothing to find; all weapons, they say, were destroyed long ago (see following story). For Bush, the failure to find WMD has been a source of political embarrassment. For his principal ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it has been a disaster, as allegations that...
Critics insist that Bush and Blair stretched the available intelligence on WMD until it fit their predetermined decision to go to war. But that can't be the whole story. There is no doubt many British and U.S. officials really believed that Saddam had at least chemical and biological weapons--the British government, certainly, would never have taken the risk of waging an unpopular war if it had genuinely thought there was nothing deadly to be found in Iraq. And in their conviction that Saddam was hiding something, Bush and Blair were not alone. Top members of Bill Clinton...
...were so many people so sure that Saddam had WMD? In part, of course, because he did once have them--and until challenged by U.N. inspectors after the first Gulf War had tried to conceal them. There may, however, have been another reason: Saddam himself apparently thought he had them. Sources tell TIME that Western intelligence intercepted communications from Saddam that indicated he was taking a keen interest in the progress of ongoing WMD programs. It may be that evidence of such programs will yet turn up. Or possibly Saddam may have been duped by his own scientists, who didn...
...fate of Iraq's WMD programs remains a mystery that Kay's group will pursue. But the absence of evidence of an imminent threat helps explain the disconnect between the U.S. and reluctant allies on Iraq. Without evidence to vindicate Washington's prewar claims, the debate at the UN is reduced to the U.S. and its coalition partners painting themselves as stewards of Iraqi liberation, while skeptics and adversaries see their presence there as an unwelcome occupation which, in the words of Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri - a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism - "has created far many...