More on the War

[seemslikeadream]

By Michael Getler
Sunday, October 31, 2004; Page B06

At a news conference in Cairo on Feb. 24, 2001, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was asked about the sanctions then in place against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Powell said, "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So, in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place." He added that the policies were always subject to review to ensure they continued to contain "the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

Seven months later, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, based in Afghanistan, attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. The United States struck back quickly and successfully in Afghanistan, although bin Laden is still at large. We now know that while the fighting in Afghanistan was still in progress, preliminary planning began for an attack on Iraq, although there was no evidence that Iraq or Hussein had anything to do with the Sept. 11 attacks.

After Sept. 11, it was certainly prudent to go back over the intelligence about terrorists and nations that harbor them. In so doing, Powell's February 2001 assessment of a contained Iraq was quickly transformed -- by the CIA, Pentagon civilian officials and the White House -- into an Iraq that was publicly described as a grave and immediate threat to this country, with images of mushroom clouds over American cities and with official certainty expressed about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction and a reconstituted nuclear weapons program.

We now know there were no weapons of mass destruction, and we know that some experts in the U.S. government disagreed, at the time, with the new internal assessments and those presented to the public. And we have been told by bipartisan congressional investigators that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12748-2004Oct30.html