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Bush, Cheney concede Saddam had no WMDs
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-10-08 07:48
President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms
yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, even as they tried
to shift the Iraq war debate to a new issue — whether the invasion was
justified because Saddam was abusing a U.N. oil-for-food program.
U.S. President
George W. Bush makes a statement on Iraq before departing the White House
in Washington, October 7, 2004. Bush said on Thursday he was "right to
take action" in Iraq even though a new U.S. report found that Iraq had no
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that its nuclear program had
decayed. [Reuters] | Ridiculing the Bush administration's evolving rationale for war, Democratic
presidential candidate John Kerry shot back: "You don't make up or find
reasons to go to war after the fact."
Vice President Dick Cheney brushed aside the central findings of chief
U.S. weapons hunter Charles Duelfer — that Saddam not only had no weapons of
mass destruction and had not made any since 1991, but that he had no capability
of making any either — while Bush unapologetically defended his decision to
invade Iraq.
"The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system,
using the U.N. oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies
in an effort to undermine sanctions," Bush said as he prepared to fly to
campaign events in Wisconsin. "He was doing so with the intent of restarting his
weapons program once the world looked away."
Duelfer found no formal plan by Saddam to resume WMD production, but the
inspector surmised that Saddam intended to do so if U.N. sanctions were lifted.
Bush seized upon that inference, using the word "intent" three times in
reference to Saddam's plans to resume making weapons.
This week marks the first time that the Bush administration has listed abuses
in the oil-for-fuel program as an Iraq war rationale. But the strategy holds
risks because some of the countries that could be implicated include U.S.
allies, such as Poland, Jordan and Egypt. In addition, the United States itself
played a significant role in both the creation of the program and how it was
operated and overseen.
For his part, Cheney dismissed the significance of Duelfer's central
findings, telling supporters in Miami, "The headlines all say `no weapons of
mass destruction stockpiled in Baghdad.' We already knew that."
The vice president said he found other parts of the report "more intriguing,"
including the finding that Saddam's main goal was the removal of international
sanctions.
"As soon as the sanctions were lifted, he had every intention of going back"
to his weapons program, Cheney said.
The report underscored that "delay, defer, wait, wasn't an option," Cheney
said. And he told a later forum in Fort Myers, Fla., speaking of the
oil-for-food program: "The sanctions regime was coming apart at the seams.
Saddam perverted that whole thing and generated billions of dollars."
Yet Bush and Cheney acknowledged more definitively than before that Saddam
did not have the banned weapons that both men had asserted he did — and had
cited as the major justification before attacking Iraq in March 2003.
Bush has recently left the question open. For example, when asked in June
whether he thought such weapons had existed in Iraq, Bush said he would "wait
until Charlie (Duelfer) gets back with the final report."
In July, Bush said, "We have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction," a sentence construction that kept alive the possibility the
weapons might yet be discovered.
On Thursday, the president used the clearest language to date nailing the
question shut:
"Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there,"
Bush said. His words placed the blame on U.S. intelligence agencies.
In recent weeks, Cheney has glossed over the primary justification for the
war, most often by simply not mentioning it. But in late January 2004, Cheney
told reporters in Rome: "There's still work to be done to ascertain exactly
what's there."
"The jury is still out," he told National Public Radio the same week, when
asked whether Iraq had possessed banned weapons.
Duelfer's report was presented Wednesday to senators and the public with less
than four weeks left in a fierce presidential campaign dominated by questions
about Iraq and the war on terror.
In Bayonne, N.J., Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards on
Thursday called "amazing" Cheney's assertions that the Duelfer report justified
rather than undermined Bush's decision to go to war, and he accused the
Republican of using "convoluted logic."
Kerry, in a campaign appearance in Colorado, said: "The president of the
United States and the vice president of the United States may well be the last
two people on the planet who won't face the truth about Iraq."
A short time later, while campaigning in Wisconsin, Bush angrily responded to
Kerry's charge he sought to "make up" a reason for war.
"He's claiming I misled America about weapons when he, himself, cited the
very same intelligence about Saddam weapons programs as the reason he voted to
go to war," Bush said. Citing a lengthy Kerry quote from two years ago on the
menace Saddam could pose, Bush said: "Just who's the one trying to mislead the
American people?"
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