Let’s watch really closely how the walk-back unfolds. And taking what was undoubtedly a hotly-debated stab at walking back the administration’s WMD claims this afternoon was Secretary of State Colin Powell.
A little more than an hour ago NPR ran an interview with the Secretary on All Things Considered. Here’s one of the key passages in which the interviewer asks Powell about why no toxins were found on the alleged chemical/biological weapons trailers found in northern Iraq (emphasis added in quotations below) …
MS. BLOCK: There were no toxins found in those trailers.
SECRETARY POWELL: Which could mean one of several things: one, they hadn’t been used yet to develop toxins; or, secondly, they had been sterilized so thoroughly that there is no residual left. It may well be that they hadn’t been used yet.
Our concern was that Iraq was keeping in place this capability, waiting for the day when they were free of sanctions and could go about putting all of their programs back in place. This particularly applies to the nuclear program. What I said in February when I spoke to the UN, was that they had the brainpower, they had the plans, and they were working on acquiring the capability, and whenever they were free of UN constraints or other constraints — nobody was breathing down their neck — there was no doubt in my mind Saddam Hussein still had the intention of developing such a capability.
And as we have seen from material that’s come forward in the last couple of days, and we’ve seen on television and in papers, we now have seen the plans, we have seen the scientists who said this is what he was supposed to be working on, and he was told to hide this material until times were better to get the program up and running again. That was the concern we had with Saddam Hussein. Not only did he have weapons — and we’ll uncover not only his weapons but all of his weapons programs — he never lost the intent to have these kinds of weapons.
So now the argument is that Iraq hadn’t reconstituted anything, but rather that they were holding on to the plans and waiting for the day when they were out of the sanctions box and could go back into the WMD business.
Frankly, I believe that’s true. I also thought they must have had some chemical and possibly biological weapons left over from the glory days before the inspectors came in. I still think they may have. And this is one of the reasons I strongly backed the need to threaten force to get inspectors back into the country and quite possibly war to remove Saddam’s regime once and for all. As I discussed a year ago, I think that circa 2001 the sanctions were hurting us more than they were hurting Saddam and that time was on his side, not ours.
But this isn’t the argument the administration made — not even close.
If this is what the White House thought, then there was no reason whatsoever to turn the world upside down in order to pull the trigger this spring.
Dick Cheney knew that, of course. Thus the recourse to bogus Niger uranium documents.
