The Missing WMD
DOCUMENT IN CONTEXT
President George W. Bush said in March 2003 that he had decided to order the inva-
sion of Iraq because Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein posed a “growing danger” to the
Middle East and even to the United States. The danger, according to Bush, came from
Iraq’s arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, its feverish work to develop nuclear
weapons, and—most importantly—the likelihood that Iraq would give these weapons
to international terrorists. The president and his aides claimed to have irrefutable evi-
dence for their statements about the threats posed by Iraq (Iraq War Prelude,
p. 486).
Weeks after the U.S. military overthrew Hussein in April 2003, Bush’s charges
about Iraq’s weapons—and thus the primary rationale he had offered for the invasion
of Iraq—began to crumble. U.S. intelligence and military officials searched frantically
for the caches of weapons they believed Iraq had hidden for years from UN inspec-
tors. U.S. officials also dug into civilian and military installations where the Iraqi gov-
ernment was believed to have produced weapons. They found nothing remotely resem-
bling the giant arsenal about which President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and
other top officials in Washington had warned.
David Kay, assigned by the Central Intelligence Agency to find Iraq’s weapons,
acknowledged to Congress in October 2003 that his efforts had been unsuccessful. In
what he called an “interim” report—investigations remained ongoing—Kay said that
Iraq had intended to build biological, chemical, and possibly even nuclear weapons,
but the U.S. searches so far had not found any.
In a more definitive report a year later, Charles A. Duelfer, Kay’s successor, sub-
mitted what he called a “comprehensive” review of the U.S. search for Iraq’s weapons.
Duelfer’s 1,000-page report stated that Iraq had destroyed its stocks of biological and
chemical weapons shortly after the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and had never made a
serious effort to restart its program to build nuclear weapons, which had been
destroyed during and after the Gulf war. “We were almost all wrong” about Iraq’s
weapons, Duelfer told a Senate committee on October 6, 2004, the day his report
became public.
These findings raised serious questions about U.S. intelligence-gathering capabili-
ties, because Bush’s allegations about Iraq’s weapons had been based largely on assess-
ments by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Congressional committees launched
investigations that revealed that the intelligence agencies had failed to question con-
ventional wisdom and had relied on Iraqi exiles and other sources whose information
was outdated or false.
Duelfer also addressed in his report the question of why the Baghdad government
had refused during most of the 1990s to cooperate with the UN agencies looking for
weapons. The chief answer, Duelfer suggested, was that Saddam Hussein saw deter-
rent value in having the rest of the world believe that he still had such weapons.
516 IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS