another important point along this road. Some people insist that President George W.
Bush launched the 2003 invasion to retaliate for Iraq’s alleged attempt to assassinate
his father, former president George H. W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait in April
1993, three months after leaving office. Others point to 1998, when a diverse group
of out-of-office Republican politicians, neoconservative intellectuals, and Iraqi exiles
persuaded Congress to adopt—and President Bill Clinton to sign—legislation putting
the United States on record as favoring the removal of Hussein from office.
The September 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks against the United States created a sense
of crisis that was necessary before any president could order American troops to invade
another country. Within days following the September 11 attacks, senior officials of
the Bush administration began talking in private about options for retaliating against
Iraq although no evidence existed, then or later, that Iraq had any involvement in the
attacks or those who launched them.
Bush signaled his focus on Iraq with two high-profile statements. At the White
House on November 26, 2001, the president warned that Iraq possessed weapons of
mass destruction and might hand them over to terrorists. Then, in his January 29,
2002, State of the Union Address, Bush declared that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea,
along with “their terrorist allies,” constituted an “axis of evil... arming to threaten
the peace of the world.” Bush focused particularly on Iraq, stating that it had “plot-
ted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade” and
was “a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” The Bush admin-
istration spent much of 2002 making the case publicly for an invasion of Iraq that
had been put on course following the September 11 attacks. By spring 2002, Penta-
gon officials had begun formulating detailed plans for an invasion, and one key inter-
national ally, British prime minister Tony Blair, had signaled his support.
Administration officials offered two rationales for targeting Baghdad. First, the
departure of UN weapons inspectors from Iraq in 1998 had given Iraqi leader Sad-
dam Hussein free rein to step up its production of weapons of mass destruction—
biological and chemical weapons and perhaps nuclear weapons as well—all of which
Hussein could in theory turn over to terrorists. Second, proposals to send UN inspec-
tors back to Iraq were misguided because the Iraqis had succeeded in misleading the
previous inspectors during the 1990s and would do so again (UN Weapons Inspec-
tions, p. 473).
Vice President Dick Cheney was the first senior administration official to go pub-
lic with these arguments, telling a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in
Nashville on August 26, 2002, that UN inspections offered the world “false comfort”
while Iraq, behind the scenes, continued to build dangerous weapons. “Simply stated,
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney
told the veterans. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional
ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors—confrontations
that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to
develop with his oil wealth.”
Some two weeks later, during his annual speech to the opening session of the UN
General Assembly on September 12, President Bush made a similarly broad case against
Hussein. Reciting the history of Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with UN weapons inspec-
tions during the 1990s, Bush argued that Iraq posed “exactly the kind of aggressive
IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS 487