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Bush ends the search for WMD
Roy Eccleston, Washington correspondent
January 14, 2005


TWO years after George W.Bush warned that Saddam Hussein faced war because he refused to disarm, the White House yesterday admitted the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had ended without finding any stockpiles.

But in an interview to be broadcast later this week Mr Bush brushed aside the failure to find WMD, the central reason for launching a war in which almost 1400 US troops and many thousands of Iraqis have died.

"I felt like we would find weapons of mass destruction ... like many - many here in the United States, many around the world," Mr Bush told the American ABC, according to excerpts from the interview.

And while the US needed to "find out what went wrong in the intelligence-gathering", Mr Bush said, the invasion had been "absolutely" worth it, even without the discovery of WMD.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan conceded yesterday that the Iraq Survey Group, which once had 1500 people combing the country for weapons with a budget of many millions of dollars, had wrapped up its work.

"The physical search has essentially ended, yes," he said, adding some staff continued to examine documents.

He said Mr Bush had last month thanked former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who led the search.

Mr McClellan said Mr Duelfer's final report, due next month, would be substantially the same as one last year that found that while Saddam once had chemical and germ weapons, and probably planned to rebuild the programs if the UN dropped its sanctions, he deliberately got rid of them during the 1990s.

Mr Duelfer believed Saddam wanted to avoid giving the UN any excuse for tightening economic sanctions, which were steadily being eroded.

Democrat house leader Nancy Pelosi demanded that Mr Bush "explain to the American people why he was so wrong, for so long, about the reasons for war".

"After a search that has consumed nearly two years and millions of dollars, and a war that has cost thousands of lives, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, nor has any evidence been uncovered that such weapons were moved to another country," Ms Pelosi said.

"Not only was there not an imminent threat to the United States, the threat described in such alarmist tones by President Bush and the most senior members of his administration did not exist at all."

In late 2002, US Vice-President Dick Cheney told Americans there was "no doubt" Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was working on a nuclear bomb.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council in early 2002: "These are not assertions we're giving you, they are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

And Mr Bush said: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and could decide on any given day to provide a biological or a chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists."

Mr McClellan defended the war yesterday, saying it was "a very unique threat that we faced in terms of Iraq, and in a post-September 11th world it was a threat you could not ignore".

"This was about advancing freedom and democracy in a dangerous region of the world."

Mr McClellan said the failure of the intelligence agencies was a concern but would not prevent the US from acting in future. "You bet the President's going to act on intelligence that he receives if it's about protecting the American people."

But he said Mr Duelfer's report "showed that much of that accumulative body of intelligence that the United States had and that our allies had, and that we had compiled over a 12-year period, was wrong".

About a year ago, Mr Bush formed a presidential commission to investigate the intelligence agencies' performance on WMD, not only on Iraq, but on the threat from other countries and terror networks. The report is due on March 31.

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You haven't heard what Wolfowitz said?
That the issue of WMDs were decided to be the reason of war because of beaurocratic reasons; it was the only reason they could all agree upon...

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President Vladimir "I Wanna Be Csar!" Putin

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