Bush Legacy on Iraq: Misinformation and False Pretense

The historical record is quickly overwhelming the Bush administration’s claims about the war in Iraq. In the past week alone, three separate reports by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Army War College, and the Washington Post, as well as statements from ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, independently show that the administration overstated and misrepresented pre-war claims about the “imminent threat” of Iraqi biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

• The administration’s handling of pre-war intelligence and diplomacy systematically distorted reality. While Iraq certainly posed a long-term threat to the U.S. and its allies, the nation’s weapons programs remained in disarray following the first Gulf War and the capacity to immediately attack the U.S. virtually non-existent. As the Carnegie report states, “Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution…Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed Iraq’s large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities.”
• The war in Iraq is a major distraction from the fight against terrorism. As the report issued by the Army War College states, “In conflating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin-Laden’s al-Qaeda, the administration unnecessarily expanded the GWOT (Global War on Terror) by launching a preventive war against a state that was not at war with the United States and that posed no direct or imminent threat to the United States at the expense of continued attention and effort to protect the United States from a terrorist organization with which the United States was at war.”
• The U.S. should immediately refocus its efforts on fighting al-Qaeda and supporting programs to stop the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Terrorists stealing or acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the materials to make them remains the single most critical threat facing the U.S. today. While we must continue to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush administration should redouble its efforts to stop al-Qaeda and lock-down loose nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, materials, and expertise in places like Russia, Pakistan, and other former Soviet states.

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