Search for WMD is officially over.

The basic story

The headline from the Washington Post pretty much says it all: "Search for WMD in Iraq ended."

The Washington Post article gives the basic facts:

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

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Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

Even so, in a press briefing on January 12, 2005, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan did not say that the search was completely over: "Well, at this point, the members of the Iraq Survey Group that are still there in Iraq -- I mean, obviously, if they hear additional reports about anything, they will follow up on those reports." Reuters got confirmation of this from an unnamed official who said "While the actual physical search is over for all intents and purposes, it's not closed in the sense that while this (document exploitation) operation continues ... if they stumble upon something in the course of that effort that says the stash is there, they are certainly going to run out there and look for it." While there will be some "document exploitation" going on, the Washington Post article indicates it will have nothing to do with WMD:

Several hundred military translators and document experts will continue to sift through millions of pages of documents on paper and computer media sitting in a storeroom on a U.S. military base in Qatar.

But their work is focused on material that could support possible war crimes charges or shed light on the fate of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot who was shot down in an F/A-18 fighter over central Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991, the opening night of the Persian Gulf War. Although he was initially reported as killed in action, Speicher's status was changed to missing after evidence emerged that he had ejected alive from his aircraft.

The work on documents is not connected to weapons of mass destruction, officials said, and a small group of Iraqi scientists still in U.S. military custody are not being held in connection with weapons investigations, either.

The Washington Post also mentioned some reasons for the cessation of the WMD search, but I will address those later in this post.

Duelfer's previous report and David Kay's assessments

Duelfer's previous report was published on September 30, 2004, and it can be found here. That report deserves detailed discussion, but here I will focus only on some of the Key Findings. And before disclosing some of the Key Findings, let's revisit some of what David Kay, Duelfer's predecessor, said about WMD. I presented a detailed discussion of Kay's assessments in The DIA and chemical weapons, and I will reiterate some of that discussion here.

Kay resigned as the leader of the ISG on January 23, 2004, and then he was all over the news. One of his first interviews was with Reuters, and this January 24, 2004, article contains this quote from Kay regarding the stockpiles of WMD that the Bush administration said absolutely existed: “I don't think they existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s...I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that's what we're really talking about.”

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But wait...there’s more from Kay. On January 28, 2004, the Washington Post published part of its interview with Kay. The major news from that interview was stated in the first two paragraphs:

U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday.

The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information -- contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis -- demonstrating that Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war.

Let me get this straight. Not only did Kay not find any WMD, but he found evidence that Saddam did destroy WMD?

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Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28, 2004. When asked if the ISG had discovered any evidence of large or even small stockpiles of WMD, Kay answered, “We simply have no evidence.”

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A recent interview of Kay appears in the August 2, 2004, issue of Chemical & Engineering News. Kay was asked why his opinion on the existence of WMD in Iraq had changed from when he first took over the ISG. Here is his response:

What changes from theory? It's the same in science: empirical evidence.

When I accepted the job--even prior to that, during the war while I was doing on-air analyses for NBC--UN inspectors were not in Iraq, had not been in Iraq since 1998. We lacked physical evidence. Then, following the war, the coalition suddenly owned the haystack as opposed to looking at the haystack from the outside.

If there had been WMD, there were three things ISG needed to find, even if we didn't find the actual weapons: a physical plant that would have produced the weapons; scientists, engineers, and technicians who would have worked on the production of those weapons; and security and other people who would have been involved in guarding or moving the weapons.

Thus, not only have we not found the large (or small) stockpiles of WMD, we have not even found any other significant evidence of WMD production or programs.

With Kay's assessments in mind, let us now look at some of the Key Findings from Duelfer's September 30, 2004, report.

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability—which was essentially destroyed in 1991—after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability—in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks—but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.

• Iran was the pre-eminent motivator of this policy. All senior level Iraqi officials considered Iran to be Iraq’s principal enemy in the region. The wish to balance Israel and acquire status and influence in the Arab world were also considerations, but secondary.

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• The former Regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead, his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them.

(emphasis in original). So, it looks like the final, final report is going to be that as of the start of the war, Iraq had no WMD and no workable plan, much less capability, to produce WMD.

And please note one more thing...Duelfer concluded that Saddam's overriding motivation to have WMD was Iran. That means his motivation was not to attack the U.S. or aid our enemies.

The White House reaction

For the White House reaction, we now turn to the Clarion of Clarity, the King of Candor, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. As noted, there was a press briefing on January 12, and it started with this Q & A:

Q: The fact that the Iraq Survey Group has now folded up its field operations, can you explain to us if there is any sense of embarrassment or lack of comfort about the fact that after two years of looking, these people found nothing that the President and others assured us they would find?

MR. McCLELLAN: I think the President already talked about this last October in response to the comprehensive report that was released by Charles Duelfer at that point. Charles Duelfer came to the White House in December; the President took that opportunity to thank him for all the work that he had done. The two discussed how Saddam Hussein's regime retained the intent and capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, and they also discussed how he was systematically gaming the system to undermine the sanctions that were in place, so that once those sanctions were eliminated -- which was something he was trying to do through the U.N. oil-for-food program -- then he could begin his weapons programs once again. And I think the President talked about the other issues back in October. Nothing has changed from that time period.

(emphasis added). Yet another example of White House SOP--don't answer the question directly and throw in a bunch of stuff that deflects attention away from the truth. Everything about thanking Duelfer, Saddam's intent to produce WMD, Saddam's "gaming the system," etc., does not change the fact that Duelfer's report said there were no stockpiles of WMD, no active WMD programs, and no ability to produce WMD. With that in mind, the italicized portion of the above excerpt is what is relevant. So what did Bush have to say in October?

George actually came out in public to issue a brief statement about Duelfer's report:

Chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, has now issued a comprehensive report that confirms the earlier conclusion of David Kay that Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.

The Duelfer report also raises important new information about Saddam Hussein's defiance of the world and his intent and capability to develop weapons. The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the U.N. oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions. He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons program, once the world looked away.

Based on all the information we have today, I believe we were right to take action, and America is safer today with Saddam in prison. He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means, and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction. And he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies. Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, a sworn enemy of our country, a state sponsor of terror, operating in the world's most volatile region. In a world after September 11, he was a threat we had to confront. And America and the world are safer for our actions.

The Duelfer report makes clear that much of the accumulated body of 12 years of our intelligence and that of our allies was wrong, and we must find out why and correct the flaws. The Silberman-Robb commission is now at work to do just that, and its work is important and essential. At a time of many threats in the world, the intelligence on which the President and the members of Congress base their decisions must be better--and it will be.

I look forward to the Intelligence Reform Commission's recommendations, and we will act on them to improve our intelligence, especially our intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.

Thank you very much.

(emphasis added). And here we see evidence of the Bush administration SOP from the Prez his ownself. George concedes that both Kay and Duelfer said there were no WMD, but then he shifts the blame to incorrect intelligence and says we have to find and correct the flaws in the intelligence system. Well, the fact is that a significant amount of our intelligence said that Iraq did not have WMD. As I said in Franks on the absence of WMD,

The now infamous NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) of October 2002 actually contained caveats and qualifiers. Indeed, as George Tenet noted in a February 5, 2004 speech, the NIE never said Iraq was an imminent threat. The Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report in September 2002 saying there was no reliable evidence of whether Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical weapons. The State Department expressed that there was not enough evidence to conclude that Iraq had a comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons. Experts in the Department of Energy did not think that Iraqi aluminum tubes were designed to produce weapons grade nuclear material. The Air Force disputed that Iraq’s unmanned aerial vehicles were intended to be used as weapons delivery systems. And there was more.

I addressed some of these issues in The NIE, generally speaking; The Air Force's position on Iraq's UAVs; and The DIA and chemical weapons.

Next, George tried to bootstrap some of what was said in Duelfer's report into a justification for going to war. Indeed, Duelfer concluded that Iraq was "gaming the system," fraudulently exploiting the Oil for Food program, trying to undermine U.N. sanctions, and trying to influence other countries with the intent to start up WMD programs. However, none of that changes the fact that both Duelfer and Kay concluded that at the time the war started, there were no WMD, no WMD programs, and no capability to start producing WMD any time soon. This is significant because the Bush administration constantly emphasized before the war that Iraq had WMD, could produce and deliver WMD, and was an imminent threat to the U.S. None of that was true, according to Kay and Duelfer, and, per the posts referenced above, there was plenty of evidence supporting those conclusions before the war. Good ol' George has never bothered to address those issues.

However, in his October 7, 2004, statement, Bush did twice hit on one of his favorite themes, namely that America is safer because we went to war and removed Saddam from power. This claim can be debated in many ways, but for now I want to focus on one of Duelfer's Key Findings. Recall that he concluded that Saddam's overriding motivation to have WMD was Iran, meaning his motivation was not to attack the U.S. or aid our enemies. So, there were no WMD, no means or plans by which to produce them, and no intention to attack the U.S. If indeed America is safer because we went to war with Iraq, just what was the threat before the war?

Even if there was a threat to U.S. , something else Bush said on October 7 exposes what I believe to be the sheer folly of this war. Bush said that Saddam had "the intent of restarting his weapons program, once the world looked away." Now it seems to me that while the U.N. inspections were ongoing, the world could not have "looked away." Indeed, the whole world was looking directly at Iraq, and the world was discovering the truth about Iraq and WMD. Was there resistance and stalling by Iraq? Yes. Was that resistance diminishing? Yes. Was the inspection process working? Yes. Look at what Hans Blix was saying and then compare it to what Kay and Duelfer said. Moreover, as long as the inspections process was ongoing, the world would never "look away," and, by Bush's own reasoning, Saddam would not have been able to restart his WMD programs. In other words--again, by Bush's own reasoning--war WAS NOT needed to keep Saddam from producing WMD. And even if Iraq had had WMD, as long as the inspections process was ongoing, Iraq would not have been able to use them, and there is a very good chance that those weapons would have been eventually discovered. Again, a war was not the ONLY way to remove any WMD threat.

Getting back to McClellan's answer quoted above, he said that Bush's response has not changed since October 7, 2004, and, as shown in the previous four paragraphs, Bush never really said anything about the conclusions of Kay and Duelfer discussed above. And Scotty went on to show that Bush has not altered his non-response:

Q: He, at that point, even since then, during the campaign on a couple of occasions, held out the possibility that something still might be found. Does he still hold out some hope that something is going to be found?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, at this point, the members of the Iraq Survey Group that are still there in Iraq -- I mean, obviously, if they hear additional reports about anything, they will follow up on those reports. But I think Charles Duelfer has made it pretty clear, and it's my understanding that the comprehensive report he issued last year is essentially the completion of his work. He's going to have an addendum that will be released at some point next month. But there are a number of documents that Charles Duelfer talked about with the President that some of the Iraq Survey Group continues to go through and learn more about the regime, itself.

Q: The President accepts that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, he said back in October that the comprehensive report by Charles Duelfer concluded what his predecessor had said, as well, that the weapons that we all believed were there, based on the intelligence, were not there. And now what is important is that we need to go back and look at what was wrong with much of the intelligence that we accumulated over a 12-year period and that our allies had accumulated over that same period of time, and correct any flaws.

Q: I just want to make sure, though, because you said something about following up on additional reports and learning more about the regime. You are not trying to hold out to the American people the possibility that there might still be weapons somewhere there, are you?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I just said that if there are -- if there are any other reports, obviously, of weapons of mass destruction, then people will follow up on those reports. I'm just stating a fact.

(emphasis added). So Bush is still blaming the faulty intelligence on WMD and trying to make that the focus instead of the facts that there were no WMD and there was intelligence that indicated that. How's that for strong leadership?

Additional issues concerning reasons for the cessation of the search

This section will digress from the WMD issue a bit and address a topic which I have not discussed in quite a while.

As I said earlier, the Washington Post article listed some reasons why the search for WMD has been halted:

Intelligence officials said there is little left for the ISG to investigate because Duelfer's last report answered as many outstanding questions as possible. The ISG has interviewed every person it could find connected to programs that ended more than 10 years ago, and every suspected site within Iraq has been fully searched, or stripped bare by insurgents and thieves, according to several people involved in the weapons hunt.

Satellite photos show that entire facilities have been dismantled, possibly by scrap dealers who sold off parts and equipment to buyers around the world.

(emphasis added). If I understand this, it means that after the war--oops, I mean "end of major combat operations"--some sites that might have been WMD-related facilities were ransacked and stripped, meaning that if there was evidence of WMD, it was removed. In other words, after we won the war, got rid of Saddam, and we were in charge of the country, thieves, insurgents, and scrap dealers managed to go in and take apart entire facilities and get rid of all the material. How could that have possibly been prevented? Maybe--and bear with me because, by golly, I know this is kinda kooky--it might have helped if we had had more troops in Iraq to handle the occupation/reconstruction phase. What say you, Rumskull and Wolfowitless? Anybody else?

And now, the questions that really matter for America.

These questions were asked at the January 12 press briefing. Here's the first one:

Q: And finally, what is the President's assessment of the damage to American credibility that might have been done by his very forceful case that there were weapons and his launching of a war on that basis?

Scotty's answer was--here's a shocker--lengthy and rambling. I will present his answer to this and the other questions in excerpts and comment as we go. So here we go...

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, nothing has changed in terms of the President's view. And if you look at the report that was issued by Charles Duelfer, again, it made very clear that the regime retained the intent and capability, that Saddam Hussein was pursuing an aggressive strategy to undermine the U.N. oil-for-food program and bring down the United Nations sanctions through illicit finance and procurement schemes, and that he intended to resume his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction once those sanctions were eliminated. It also made clear that he was in material breech of Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1441, which gave him one final opportunity to comply.

While Scotty's statements are basically true, they really don't answer the question. I reiterate that these statements do not in any way change the fact that Duelfer and Kay concluded that when we went to war, Iraq had no WMD, no WMD programs, no workable plan, and no capability to start producing WMD any time soon. There was no imminent or marginally imminent threat from Iraq related to WMD, yet Bush and his entire administration insisted over and over and over that such an imminent threat existed. That was the cornerstone and foundation for this war, and not only was it incorrect, there was evidence--and intelligence--before the war that showed there was no imminent threat. All that certainly raises questions of American credibility for the future, and yet Scotty's initial response to the first question does not address that credibility in any way. Maybe other parts of his rambling response did. Let's have a look...

And remember, September 11th changed the equation about how we confront the threats that we face, and the President recognizes what his most important responsibility is, and that is to do everything in his power to protect the American people. And nothing has changed in terms of his views when it comes to Iraq, what he has previously stated and what you have previously heard. The President knows that by advancing freedom in a dangerous region, we are making the world a safer place.

I'm surprised it took him this long to play the administration's biggest trump card: 9-11. Anyone who questions anything Bush has done is necessarily ignoring 9-11 and is a freedom hater and terrorist. And because of 9-11, Bush's "most important responsibility" is to protect Americans, which prompts me to ask again...protect us from what? A dictator that had no WMD, no WMD programs, no capacity or plan to start producing WMD, and whose overriding reason for wanting WMD was Iran and NOT attacking the U.S.?

This is a historic and hopeful time in the broader Middle East. We've seen elections take place in Afghanistan. We've seen elections move forward for a new Palestinian President in the Palestinian areas. It's a unique opportunity to achieve peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and realize the President's two-state vision. And the Iraqi people have a very hopeful moment coming for them at the end of this month when, for the first time, they will freely choose a transitional government, and then they will follow up with a couple of additional elections this year. And that's important to making America more secure and making the world a better place.

Again, Scotty speaks some truth, but what does it have to do with Iraq and the question of America's credibility? No one really questioned invading Afghanistan and getting rid of the Taliban. Indeed, the world supported our actions. Iraq was and is a different situation. Afghanistan protected and sponsored the group that attacked our country. No one connected with Iraq attacked this country or even had any capability to attack this country (and sometime in the future I will address in great detail all the claims that Iraq was sponsoring and training terrorists to attack the U.S.). The same can be said of the Palestinians and Israelis, and we have not invaded those people in order to establish elections in Palestine. In Iraq, we invaded a country that posed no threat to us, and we based that invasion largely on the insistence that it did pose an imminent threat to our country. C'mon, Scott. Answer the damn question.

For some reason, the reporters at the briefing were not satisfied with Scott's version of "freedom is on the march," so someone asked some more questions.

Q: Just one more. What I was getting at is looking forward -- when it comes to Iraq, North Korea, and the President -- this President stands up and says, they've got weapons programs, they've got weapons of mass destruction, isn't it the case that there will be many people in the world who will say, how can we believe him? And how does he deal with that?

Perhaps this reporter felt Scotty might not have understood the word "credibility" and decided to ask these more specific questions. And maybe Scotty would actually answer these questions. Excuse me while I wait for the monkeys to fly out of my butt...

MR. McCLELLAN: He's going to continue working with the international community to confront the threats that we face. He recognizes what his most important responsibility is; that's the safety and security of the American people. And at the same time, we are acting to make sure that we have the best possible intelligence. We have taken a number of steps since September 11th to improve our intelligence-sharing and gathering of information. We're working closely with friends and allies across the globe to win the global war on terrorism. We will continue to do that. We will continue to coordinate our efforts, and we will continue to share our information so that we can act on that intelligence. But we're also going to continue taking steps to make sure that that intelligence is the best possible intelligence.

Scotty, Scotty, Scotty...At least you're showing consistency by talking about the safety of the American people and improving intelligence. And then he throws in "going to continue working with the international community." Continue? Are you kidding me? Like telling NATO that we did not want it involved in invading Afghanistan, calling the UN irrelevant, insulting longtime allies, etc.? But wait, there's more from Scotty:

Our friends and allies had the same intelligence that we had when it came to Saddam Hussein, and now we need to continue to move forward to find out what went wrong and to correct those flaws. And that's exactly what the independent commission the President appointed is going to do. And they're going to make recommendations, and the President is committed to acting on those recommendations.

Again, some of our intelligence showed the opposite of what the Bush administration was emphatically saying was true. The British also had similar intelligence (that will have to be addressed in a separate post), and some of the British intelligence which was cited as a reason for the war was actually plagiarized from an academic paper that was about ten years old and extremely out of date.

And still the reporters were not satisfied.

Q: Scott, this is an important political question that you're not really addressing squarely, which is, can this President or a future President go to a Tony Blair or a leader of Spain and say, we believe something is happening and you need to join us in a preemptive show of force? Has this experience not totally wiped out that possibility for political action in the future?

(emphasis added). That opening line sure hit the nail on the head. Then again, I am not sure that I can find any instance where McClellan has addressed a tough question squarely. Might he now do so?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, first of all -- a couple of things -- we're working together in a number of areas to confront threats that the international community faces. We're working together to confront threats in places like North Korea and Iran. The President is pursuing diplomatic solutions in close consultation with other countries. I think that the people in the region, in the Korean Peninsula region, recognize the importance of having a non-nuclear Peninsula --

Q: I'm talking about preemptive military action.

MR. McCLELLAN: Right. And that's the last option that you always want to pursue. But the President is going to continue working closely with our friends and allies to confront the threats that we face --

Q: How can he do it again --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- and we continue to take steps to improve our intelligence. That's what the President is going to do. We have very good relationships with countries across the world because of the President's efforts over the last few years. He's worked to build strong relationships with our friends and allies, and worked to make sure that we're confronting the threats that we face. It's important that we act together to confront the threats that we face. And it's important that when we say something, that we follow through on what we say. That's why the President is also --

Q: Even if the information is wrong?

MR. McCLELLAN: -- that's why the President is also working to strengthen the United Nations and make it more effective. That's something that we're working on, as well, because it was very clear what the international community expected of Saddam Hussein, and he continued to defy the international community. It was a very unique threat that we faced in terms of Iraq. And in a post-September 11th world, it was a threat you could not ignore.

(emphasis added). Did Scotty squarely answer the question? Somebody--anybody--explain in terms that my apparently inferior mind can comprehend how he squarely answered the question about preemptive military action. And then explain to me why this opinion is not correct: based on Bush's actions, it seems to me that he feels "It's important that we act together to confront the threats that we face" unless someone disagrees with him, in which case America will say "screw you, we're going to do whatever we want." McClellan seems to say that not only was Iraq a threat, but the only way to address that threat was with war. As shown above, whatever threat Iraq posed did not require war as the only option.

It should come as no surprise that I think this whole WMD debacle has really hurt our credibility. If anyone thinks I'm wrong, feel free to enlighten me.

And now for one more question and answer.

Q: Secretary Rumsfeld said you go -- infamously, he said, "you go to war with the Army that you have." Well, this administration went to war, when it went to war, based on information that proved to be incorrect. Does the President now regret the timing of this? Does he feel that the war effort and its aftermath and the post-immediate war conflict phase was undermined by that timetable and intelligence that was wrong?

MR. McCLELLAN: Based on what we know today, the President would have taken the same action, because this is about protecting the American people.

(emphasis added). In all seriousness and without any sarcasm, I tell you that this really scares me. What is even scarier is--as I have said before--most of what we know today is not really different from what we knew before the war, and still Bush ordered this war.