Seeking Honesty in US Policy: "The president told us in his seminal speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that Iraq ``possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons . . . is seeking nuclear weapons . . . has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people.''
...Now we know that even if we find chemical or biological weapons, the threat that they posed to our national security was, to be charitable, exaggerated.
It all but disappeared from the president's speech last week and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the leading proponents of the threat, now tells us that he didn't even ask the chief weapons-of-mass-destruction sleuth in Iraq, David Kay, for a status report during his recent trip to Baghdad, relegating such weapons to the same dark corner as bin Laden, whose name rarely passes the lips of our leaders these days.
Indeed, in the most telling revision of the justification for going to war, the State Department's undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, recently said that whether Saddam's government actually possessed weapons of mass destruction ``isn't really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the capability that Iraq sought to have . . . WMD programs.''"
- posted by geoff @ #