Fact Checker: The Iraq war and WMDs: an intelligence failure or White House spin?
By Glenn Kessler Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker Email Bio Follow March 22 at 3:00 AM “The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow. There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed ‘Bush lied. People died.’ This accusation itself is a lie. It’s time to put it to rest.”Sixteen years after the Iraq War started, the White House press spokesman at the time sought to rebut a claim he called a “liberal myth” — that George W.
He also supplied excerpts from Bush’s 2010 memoir, in which the president reflects that even countries opposed to the war, such as Germany, agreed that Iraq had WMDs. “The conclusion that Saddam had WMD was nearly a universal consensus. My predecessor believed it. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill believed it. Intelligence agencies in Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, and Egypt believed it,” Bush wrote in “Decision Points.
The Facts The short answer is that both played a role. There were serious problems in the intelligence, some of which were relegated to dissenting footnotes. But the Bush administration also chose to highlight aspects of the intelligence that helped make the administration’s case, while playing down others.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report was unsparing in its criticism of this aspect of the White House’s case for war. The 170-page report said such Iraq/al-Qaeda statements were “not substantiated by the intelligence,” adding that multiple CIA reports dismissed the claim that Iraq and al-Qaeda were cooperating partners — and that there was no intelligence information that supported administration statements that Iraq would provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda.
Also, before the war, CIA Director George Tenet warned the White House not to use sketchy intelligence about Iraqi purchases of uranium in Africa. But the White House inserted it into a presidential speech anyway, much to its later embarrassment. After the war, officials discovered that Iraq had not conducted biological weapons production research since 1996. Iraq could have reestablished an elementary program within weeks, but no indications were found that Iraq intended to do so.
Conclusion: “Statements in the major speeches analyzed, as well as additional statements, regarding Iraq’s possession of chemical weapons were substantiated by intelligence information. Statements by the president and vice president prior to the October 2002 NIE … did not [reflect] the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.”
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