328 a short history of the united states
running the government, the Bush administration decided to launch a
preemptive attack against Iraq. Encouraged by his close associate Vice
President Cheney; the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld; and the
deputy secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, with the active support of the Na-
tional Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the reluctant agree-
ment of the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, President Bush decided
to ask Congress for authority to overthrow the Hussein dictatorship.
These advisers expected the Iraqi people to welcome an American in-
vasion and bring a measure of democracy to the country. More trou-
bling was the fear that Hussein had obtained biological and chemical
weapons and was attempting to obtain uranium deposits from Niger in
Africa in order to build weapons of mass destruction, even though UN
weapons inspectors had failed to discover any trace of WMD within
Iraq. The Bush advisers also believed that Hussein had connections
with Al Qaeda operatives stationed around the world. In all, the evi-
dence seemed overwhelming to support a military strike to spare hu-
manity a catastrophic blow.
The trouble with this evidence was that none of it was true. There
were no WMD in Iraq; nor were there connections to Al Qaeda. Intel-
ligence agencies in the government tried to alert the administration to
these errors, but they were ignored. Brent Scowcroft, the former Na-
tional Security Adviser to George H. W. Bush, warned that an inva-
sion of Iraq “could turn the whole region,” not simply Iraq itself, “into
a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism.”
On October 10 , 2002 , Congress, including many Democrats in both
houses who voted with the Republican majority, some of whom later
repudiated their action, agreed to permit a preemptive strike against
Iraq. Still the Bush administration held back for the moment, when
foreign nations disapproved. On November 8 , the UN unanimously
passed a resolution giving Iraq three and a half months to permit
weapons inspectors to determine whether WMD actually existed
within the country. Hussein had expelled the inspectors in 1998 , but
now he agreed to their return, and although he had no WMD he regu-
larly, and foolishly, created problems for the inspectors in carrying out
their assignment. He was also required to produce a full statement of
his country’s weaponry.
The Bush administration, itching to start a war with Iraq, chose to