t he p erils of o ptimism 283He and other offi cials made clear over the following weeks that Iraq fi t
the criteria, with the vice president going so far as to claim on August
26, 2002, that the United States had firm proof that Saddam had
WMD. (Cheney’s assertion evidently caught the president, Rice, and
others off guard, but they picked up the alarmist refrain.) Lest Ameri-
cans underestimate the potential danger of letting Saddam Hussein
remain in power, senior administration offi cials warned that conclusive
evidence of his nefarious designs might come in the form of a “mush-
room cloud.” Bush declared in early October that the containment
policy had failed and that Saddam already possessed chemical and bio-
logical weapons.
Th e drumbeat of warnings achieved the desired eff ect. With 9/11 still
a fresh memory, it was easy to stoke popular fears, which is exactly what
the administration’s propaganda campaign intended. The adminis-
tration chose its words with great care, too, to avoid saying explicitly
anything that it knew to be untrue or unsubstantiated, such as that
Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Few in the
media questioned the assertions, while administration offi cials were
quoted far more often than the skeptics. As is always the case when
media coverage slants overwhelmingly in favor of the offi cial side of an
issue, the public bought the administration position and its insinua-
tions. An overwhelming majority of Americans believed Saddam
Hussein still possessed WMD, while a lesser majority drew the con-
clusion that he had connections to al-Qaeda and even that he had par-
ticipated in the planning for 9/11.
Beneath the broad trends in public opinion, partisan diff erences still
appeared—Republicans were more likely to accept the administration’s
line. Best, then, to get Democratic leaders to sign off on military action.
In mid-October, the administration capitalized on the upcoming
midterm elections to secure congressional approval for the use of force
to compel Iraq to give up its WMD programs. To address lawmakers’
concerns about the quality of evidence on Saddam’s WMD program
before they voted on the resolution, the administration prepared a
Special National Intelligence Estimate, with the summary sanitized of
all earlier caveats and offi cial dissents about the WMD intelligence.
Many Democrats, concerned about appearing soft, voted in favor, and
the measure passed by wide margins in both chambers.