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Finding Truth: Chief Weapons Inspector Reveals Iraq had Nothing

On October 6, 2004, C.I.A. chief weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer released his final report on the U.S. investigation of Iraq’s weapons programs. The 918-page report explained that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.- led invasion and, in fact, did not even have programs in place to develop such weapons.

In addition, President Bush’s former administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremmer, criticized the administration for sending too few troops and intimated that this mistake has led to the current disorder in Iraq.

How does this information correspond with what the candidates are saying? How does each candidate play off of the Duelfer report to further his own argument? How has the presidential debate shifted (or not shifted) as new information about the war becomes available? These important questions are worth consideration as November 2nd rapidly approaches.

Report details

Duelfer’s report explains that Iraq was unable to reinstate its weapons programs after the Persian Gulf War, which destroyed them. There were no stockpiles of biological, chemical, nuclear, or other weapons of mass destruction, due to the strict U.N. sanctions that prevented their development.

While previous reports have come to similar conclusions, Duelfer’s report is unique in its depth and detail, and Duelfer was chosen by the Bush administration to complete the investigation.

Duelfer concluded that Saddam Hussein was not interested in developing weapons to strike the United States, but rather aspired to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction in order to frighten Iran, a long-time enemy.

Nevertheless, Hussein’s aspirations to reinstate his weapons programs were never realized. The report notes that "the former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions."

However, Hussein hoped to persuade the U.N. to lift these sanctions and he had already created an international network of countries and companies that allowed him to import banned technology. Further, Duelfer’s team found Iraqi plans and designs for long-range ballistic missiles, which were forbidden by the U.N. agreement that ended the Gulf War. But these missiles were in the design phase only and there were no plans for production.

Overall, Iraq was largely truthful with weapons inspectors before the war. For example, there is no stockpile of chemical weapons, just as Iraqi officials claimed. The White House was convinced that Hussein was hiding chemical weapons because the intelligence community reported missing chemical agents. The report explains that these missing chemicals don’t exist, and that the discrepancy can be attributed to accounting errors.

Candidates’ responses

How are the candidates dealing with this information? Both Bush and Kerry believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invaded Iraq. Kerry based his Senate vote authorizing the president to go to war on this presumption, and Bush justified the act of war with this belief. Now that the WMD illusion is shattered, how are the candidates responding?

Bush maintains that he was right to invade Iraq. He has an ends-justify-the-means point of view, saying that we are safer now than we were when Saddam Hussein was in power. Bush focuses on the parts of the Duelfer report that claim Hussein "wanted" or "aspired" to create weapons. And Bush continually points out that Kerry too believed that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were a threat when the U.S. went to war.

Kerry explains that he voted to give Bush the power to go to war so that the U.S. would have a better bargaining stance in the negotiations with Iraq. He argues that going to war should always be a last resort and that the President did not exhaust diplomacy. Kerry challenges Bush to admit his haste and says that without acknowledging the problems in Iraq, the President can do very little to stabilize the region.

In essence, the candidates are sticking to their stances, despite the bright light of new information. Bush has not reevaluated his decisions, and Kerry is sticking to his message: we got into the war under false pretenses, but now that we’re there, we have to win it.

Both candidates leave a lot of questions unanswered, such as what is the significance of U.S. intelligence being so drastically wrong? How is the Arab world responding to the Duelfer report? With no weapons of mass destruction to be found and a destabilized Iraq, Is the U.S. and the world really safer today?

What do you think?

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Update Posted on: 10/10/2004