Weapons of Mass Disappearance

The war in Iraq was based largely on intelligence about banned 
arms that still haven't been found. Was America's spy craft wrong 
- or manipulated?  

By MICHAEL DUFFY

How do take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? You 
could subcontract with another nation, fight on the sly and hope no one 
notices. But if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like 
to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you 
need most is a good reason - something to stir up the folks back home.  

As the U.S. prepared to go to war in Iraq last winter, the most 
compelling reason advanced by George W. Bush to justify a new 
kind of pre-emptive war was that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, 
chemical and biological arms - weapons of mass destruction (wmd). 

"There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical 
and biological weapons," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 
January. "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," 
said Vice President Dick Cheney in March. That Iraq might have WMD 
was never the only reason the Bush Administration wanted to topple 
Saddam. But it was the big reason, the casus belli, the public rationale 
peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies 
and a hostile United Nations to get behind the controversial invasion. 
And while that sales pitch fell flat overseas, it worked better than 
expected at home: by late March, 77% of the public felt that invading  
U.S. troops would find WMD. 

But eight weeks after the war's end, most of that confident intelligence 
has yet to pan out, and a growing number of experts think it never will. 
Current and former U.S. officials have begun to question whether the 
weapons will ever be found in anything like the quantities the U.S. 
suggested before the war - if found at all - and whether the U.S. 
gamed the intelligence to justify the invasion. 

For now, WMD seems to stand for weapons of mass disappearance. 
Smarting from the accusations that they had cooked the books, 
top U.S. officials fanned out late last week to say the hunt 
would go on and the weapons would eventually be found. CIA officials 
told TIME that they would produce a round of fresh evidence for 
increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week. After dispatching 
dozens of G.I. patrols to some 300 suspected WMD sites in Iraq over 
the past two months, only to come up empty-handed, the Pentagon 
announced last week that it will shift from hunting for banned 
weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able 
to say where banned weapons are - or were. But it is clear that 
the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We've been to virtually 
every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and 
Baghdad," Lieut. General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st 
Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply 
not there." 

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Full article at Time ....
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,455767,00.html

Cheers, Steve..

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