Fuel just keeps being added to this fire.
Here's the train of events over the last week:
Sunday, October 3 - New York Times releases the findings of their investigation into the aluminum tubes the Bush administration claimed was the most damning evidence of Hussein's nuclear program. The investigation asserts that nuclear experts consulted by the White House seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, and were most likely for small artillery rockets.
Tuesday, October 5 - L. Paul Bremer, the former top administrator in Iraq told the press that not enough troops had been committed to the ground at the outset of the war, resulting in mass looting and destruction of facilities, including arms stockpiles.
Wednesday, October 6 - To cap everything off, the top American weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, asserted in his report, made public today, that Iraq had destroyed its illegal weapons capability soon after the 1991 Gulf War.
As the NYTimes wrote, "The findings amounted to the starkest portrayal yet of a vast gap between the Bush administration's prewar assertions about Iraqi weapons and what a 15-month postinvasion inquiry by American investigators concluded were the facts on the ground."
"At the time of the American invasion, Mr. Duelfer concluded, Iraq had not possessed military-scale stockpiles of illicit weapons for a dozen years and was not actively seeking to produce them."
As for the claim that Saddam wanted to restart his weapons program, despite the fact that no weapons were found:
"Mr. Hussein "wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted," the report said. But the conclusion that Mr. Hussein had intended to restart his programs, the report acknowledged, was based more on inference than solid evidence. "The regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of W.M.D. after sanctions," it said, using the common abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction."
I'm not a fool - I don't think anyone thinks that Saddam didn't have the intention of acquiring/building illicit weapons, but invading on the basis of intent to acquire weapons sounds far from reasonable when Iran and North Korea are much farther along that process than Iraq was going to be for a while.
This report just further demostrates what the news events earlier this week have shown - that the Bush administration rushed into war without
1) justifying the necessity of the war on credible evidence
Article comments