The claim of weapons of mass destruction as casus belli in Iraq is one of the most controversial legacies a year after the war began. Despite the skepticism, a substantial number of people believe that the administration was telling the truth when it said the weapons were an immediate threat.
“I believe that there was and is good reason to think there were WMDs in Iraq at the time and that the evidence crossed the border into Syria during the long waiting period before the war,” said Tim O’Brien, a public-relations executive in Pittsburgh.
Others who think that there were weapons, a group tha treaches 50 percent in some polls, cannot believe the administration would deliberately mislead people about the threat because the risk of getting caught in that kind of fabrication was too great.
“First, I cannot believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the American public regarding weapons of mass destruction,” said Jerald Podair, a professor of American history at Lawrence University in Appleton,Wis.
“I say this not because I think this administration is especially virtuous, but because Rule 1 for any liar is: Don’t get caught. If this was a lie, the bill for it would be payable in full, and soon. The charges swirling around this issue remind me of the crazier conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.”
–Vincent J. Schodolski
Weapons claims were exaggerated
“I think the administration did mislead the U.S. public, but not necessarily in the way most people think,” said William Newmann, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“The assumption is that the administration simply lied, cooked up the facts and stated as facts things they knew were simply not true. But intelligence information on a closed society such as Iraq is murky, ambiguous and subject to interpretation.
“The administration took a lot of uncertainties, intelligence analyses that used qualifiers such as `might’ or `could have’ or `potentially’ and interpreted them as `definitely.'”
The Bush administration clearly exaggerated some components of the threat and adjusted their statements only after they were challenged, one specialist said.
“Although most of the intelligence community thought that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons, the administration exaggerated the Iraqi WMD threat,” said Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace & Liberty in Oakland.
“In some instances, the allegation of WMD was intended to mislead the public, but in the case of most of those within the vice president’s office and the Pentagon–the two places where the neoconservatives rule–this was much more a case of self-delusion,” said Donald Snow, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama and an expert on military affairs and terrorism.
–Vincent J. Schodolski
