Bush's credibility tainted

2003-06-02 13:27

Washington - President George W Bush's administration faces credibility problems after insisting for months that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent security threat, experts say.

Bush cited stockpiles of banned weapons as a justification for waging war on Iraq but since the toppling of President Saddam Hussein's regime, the US military has found no concrete proof of their existence.

"There is a very big disconnect between the intelligence as reflected by open statements by the administration before the invasion of Iraq and what they've found on the ground," Vincent Cannistrano, former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, said.

US officials are now saying the weapons might have been destroyed, buried or transported elsewhere prior to the start of the war and are sending in a new 1 300-member team to step up the hunt this week.

On Thursday, Bush cited two specially equipped tractor-trailer rigs seized in Iraq as evidence of a biological warfare program, though intelligence analysts acknowledged they had no concrete evidence the trailers were used to make biological agents.

"That's a far cry from the report put out in October 2002 when the CIA estimated that there was several hundreds tons of biological and chemical agents stockpiles in the hands of Saddam Hussein," Cannistrano said.

"They haven't found anything like that at all and certainly nothing that has been weaponised.

"It is self-evident that their credibility is diminished, particularly in the international arena," he added.

"Two months after the war, finding just two rusty trailers - its clear the Bush administration has a credibility problem," agreed John Pike, a defence analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.

"The only way to get out of it is to find WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq," he said.

"Unless some middle-level Iraqi engineer shows up and take us to the warehouse, we're going to have to go back to the very beginning in terms of looking at the American assessment of Iraq's WMD capabilities and try to understand why there may have been some systematic errors."

For retired General Edward Atkeson, a former army intelligence officer who is now a consultant for the Institute of Land Warfare, talk of banned weapons was an "excuse" for the administration's true goal in Iraq - regime change.

"The main thing they wanted to do was to change the regime. That became pretty clear," he said.

Senior US lawmakers from both major political parties said on Sunday a congressional investigation might be needed to determine whether US intelligence sources exaggerated information on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the war.

Senator John McCain told ABC television's This Week programme he still believed weapons would be found, adding: "Obviously all of us are disappointed that we haven't found more so far."

But in a recent interview with The Washington Post, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, said the apparent absence of such weapons raised serious concerns about misuse of power.

"Contrary to what Mr Bush tried to convince this nation of, Saddam Hussein did not constitute an imminent danger to this nation," Byrd said.

"The Bush team's extensive hype of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a justification for a preemptive invasion has become more embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power," he added.

"Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?" - Sapa-AFP

- SAPA