The Ming Report

RIDING DRAG

October 7, 2004 - Iraq destroyed its biological and chemical weapons within months of the end of the 1991 Gulf War. There is no evidence that Iraq pursued any program to produce or deploy any biological, chemical or nuclear weapons after the 1991 Gulf War. The last Iraqi factory capable of producing militarily significant quantities of unconventional weapons was destroyed in 1996. At the time of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime had no weapons of mass destruction nor did it have the capacity to produce them. That is the conclusion of the Bush Administration’s last arms inspector Charles A. Duelfer included in his final report published today. Admitting that in the 15 month examination by the Iraq Survey Group produced no evidence to support his assertion; that he could only cite the nature of the Iraqi government Duelfer concluded that Saddam wanted to resume WMD programs once the sanctions regime was lifted.

It is the third instance in two weeks in which administration officials have negated the Bush rationale for invading Iraq and its conduct of the ensuing war. First L. Paul Bremer, speaking at DePauw University in mid September and repeating the assertion last week, said that the US never had enough troops for the job – not in the beginning and not in the aftermath. Next Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld admitted what the rest of the world has known since the report of the 911 Commission – there is no evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and the Ba`athist regime. Now we have the final report that the President confidently said in June would support the proposition that Saddam Hussein had a WMD weapons program. It says that rather than a growing and gathering threat, as the President said yesterday, Saddam represented a steadily diminishing threat to peace.

Did the President mislead us into war or was he himself misled by his own stubborn view that Saddam Hussein was a clear and present danger to the United States? There is strong circumstantial evidence that the Administration doubted its own claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the months leading up to the invasion the United States massed troops in Kuwait, within easy range of the 105 mile range missiles that the Iraqi Army possessed legally. In January 2001 fully 120,000 US troops had been assembled as a prime target for an Iraqi preemptive strike using chemical and biological weapons had they been available to the enemy. Either the high command knew it was putting its available forces in a highly vulnerable position or it knew that it was safe to place them there. To pose that question is to answer it.

It does not matter whether the President launched the war by knowingly misleading the American people and the world or whether it was a product of his stubborn insistence on ignoring intelligence estimates that did not support his drive to invade Iraq. He did it and we are in it and it is a war that we cannot win by following a “more of the same” strategy. It is a war that we dare not lose. Fail to bring the conflict in Iraq to a successful conclusion and we destroy our credibility as the leader of an increasingly democratic world.

We won’t be successful if we continue to go it alone in both the military and reconstruction efforts. A successful course is one in which America leads by opening up the pacification and reconstruction of Iraq to all nations – those who accepted the Bush Administrations flawed justification for going to war and those whose own assessments were vindicated by the Duelfer report. We have been riding drag in a Texas cattle drive and we are choking in the dust. It is time to lead.