Rice defends Iraqi war

2004-10-10 17:55

Washington - US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday defiantly defended the invasion of Iraq, saying the US would have taken the same decision even if Washington had known that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

"He was someone who had an insatiable appetite for weapons of mass destruction. He had the means, he had the intent, he had the money to do it," Rice told the Fox News Sunday television program.

"You were never going to break the link between Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.

"And now we know that, had we waited, he would have gotten out of the sanctions, he would have undermined them by both trying to pay off people on the Security Council and doing what he could to keep his expertise in place," Rice said.

Rice's latest defence of the war came after the top US weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, released a 1 000-page report that found Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War defeat and that his nuclear program had "progressively decayed."

But Rice stuck to the administration's description of Saddam's Iraq as a "grave and gathering threat," even as Duelfer's report undermined the White House's chief rationale for the war.

"Because we invaded the country, because we were able to interview the scientists and get the documents that Saddam Hussein refused to get to the United Nations, we now know that he did not have those stockpiles," she said.

"What we learned in the Duelfer report what that there was another kind of grave and growing threat, and ... that he was undermining the sanctions," she said.

"He was keeping in place the expertise. He was keeping in place some of the materials. He intended that, when the world looked the other way, when sanctions were lifted - and he was actively undermining them, they were eroding - he intended to rebuild his weapons of mass destruction programs."

"It was time to take care of this threat. You were never going to break the link between Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. It was only a matter of time," she said.

- SAPA