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Weapons 'no longer the issue'
09/09/2003 12:25 - (SA)
Washington - United States President George W. Bush has changed his public rationale for the increasingly costly American military effort in Iraq. The once-heralded search for weapons of mass destruction is now little more than a footnote as Bush recasts Iraq into Ground Zero in a broader war against terrorism.
So downgraded has the hunt for such weapons become that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he didn't even bring it up when he met in Baghdad on Saturday with David Kay, the CIA adviser heading the search.
"I'm assuming he'd tell me if he'd gotten something," Rumsfeld told reporters travelling with him on Monday.
Saddam Hussein's arsenal isn't the only item dropped from the administration's rhetoric. Also gone are the early assurances that, unlike barren Afghanistan, Iraq could easily finance its own reconstruction from oil revenues.
More than five months after Bush stood on a carrier deck under a "Mission Accomplished" banner and proclaimed major combat operations over, no weapons of mass destruction have been found and Iraqi oil exports have failed to bring in large revenues.
Attacks on US troops
Meanwhile, deadly attacks on American forces are continuing, terror bombings are on the rise and Saddam's fate remains unknown.
The president's speech to the nation on Sunday was a sombre acknowledgment that winning the peace in Iraq is proving far more complex and costly than winning the war.
With the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaching, "Iraq is now the central front" in the US-led war on terrorism, Bush asserted. He said it would take $87-billion more for the job in Iraq and Afghanistan and called for a United Nations peacekeeping force in Iraq.
"The president clearly has changed course here," said former Republican Lee Hamilton , vice chairman of the national commission on terrorist attacks against the United States.
Can't do it alone
"He speaks now about a transformation of the Middle East and he certainly blends together the war on terrorism with the effort to build a stable Iraq. And he went on record seeking international help, which is a change in tactic that comes about because he simply found out we can't do it alone," said Hamilton, former chairman of the House International Relations Committee.
US and British occupation forces have found little to justify pre-war claims by the president and British Prime Minister Tony Blair that Saddam possessed chemical, biological and possibly even nuclear weapons - and was poised to use them.
Bush's claim in his State of the Union address that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa has been discredited. No weapons of mass destruction have been located, even though searchers have found quantities of chemicals and substances that could be used to make both weapons and legitimate civilian items.
US forces turned up two truck trailers that some administration officials contended were probably biological weapons labs. But a team of Pentagon investigators also said they could have been used to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons, just as the Iraqis had said.
Whether Saddam actually possessed weapons of mass destruction "isn't really the issue," John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, now suggests. "The issue I think has been the capability that Iraq sought to have," Bolton said in a recent interview.
Benjamin Barber, professor of civil society at the University of Maryland and author of the book, Fear's Empire: war, terrorism and democracy, said that Bush's recast war rationale makes it easier for administration hawks to justify pre-emptive wars as a means of going after terrorism.
"That's a more serious mistake than to try to claim we were going after weapons of mass destruction," Barber said. "It sends the wrong note to our allies at the United Nations."
The president's congressional allies welcomed his new war rationale.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar called Bush's address "a comprehensive presentation of the scope of our war against terrorism, its current focus, our determination to succeed and the cost".
- AP
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