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Bush, Senior White House Officials Defend Iraq War By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush and senior members of his administration yesterday defended Operation Iraqi Freedom, citing the security threat posed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his abysmal treatment of the Iraqi people (see GSN, Oct. 7). Last week, chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay damaged one of the major justifications offered by the White House prior to the war — Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction — when he reported to Congress that no such weapons had been found after three months of searching (see GSN, Oct. 3). Kay also said his team, the Iraq Survey Group, had also found no evidence of active Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons programs at the time of the invasion. In his report to Congress, however, Kay said the group discovered evidence of a large number of Iraqi WMD-related program activities and equipment that had been hidden from U.N. weapons inspectors. Senior White House officials, including Bush, yesterday picked up on that point as a justification for war. “Since the liberation of Iraq, our investigators have found evidence of a clandestine network of biological laboratories, advanced design work on prohibited long-range missiles, an elaborate campaign to hide these illegal programs,” Bush said last night during a speech at the 2003 Republican National Committee presidential gala in Washington. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice echoed Bush’s comments in a separate speech. “Let there be no mistake: Right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with … weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activities,” she said yesterday during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in Chicago. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton complemented those remarks from London. “Whether they were in weaponized form or not is really not the issue. The issue is that the regime that had a pattern of trying to get and use these weapons … has now been eliminated,” he said in a BBC interview yesterday. Bush described Hussein as “ a gathering threat” to U.S. security that had to be defeated. “The lessons of September the 11th are lessons we must not forget. I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman. I was not going to stand by and wait and trust the sanity and restraint of Mr. Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. Rice yesterday criticized opponents of the war who argued that whatever potential threat Iraq had posed to the United States, it was not an imminent one. “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recrimininations would come too late,” she said. “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy and not an option,” Rice added. Rice also said that the overthrow of Hussein aided the international war on terrorism and improved the lives of Iraqis as well. “The war on terror is greatly served by the removal of this source of instability in the world's most unstable region. And the people of Iraq are free and working towards self-government. Step by step, normal life in Iraq is being reborn as basic services are restored, in some cases, for the first time in decades,” Rice said. “Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms and children’s prisons are closed,” she said.
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