|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
Senate Confirms Rice After Debating Iraqi WMD Threat By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate today voted 85-13 to confirm national security adviser Condoleezza Rice as the next secretary of state, following a scathing debate yesterday over the Bush administration’s case to go to war on Iraq in March 2003 over suspected weapons of mass destruction and Rice’s role in making that argument (see GSN, Jan. 25). While praising her credentials, some Democrats charged Rice and other top officials with lying or purposely misleading the U.S. public and Congress regarding U.S. intelligence findings to argue there was an urgent Iraqi threat. Republicans accused her critics of “partisan politics.” Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) said that Rice and other officials misled the public into thinking Iraq posed an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, while at the same time arguing that war was justified regardless of an imminent threat. Rice “took a position on the front lines of the administration’s efforts to hype the danger of [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein]’s weapons of mass destruction,” he said. Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said, “In her public statements, she clearly overstated and exaggerated the intelligence concerning Iraq before the war in order to support the president’s decision to initiate military action against Iraq. Since the Iraq effort has run into great difficulty, she has also attempted to revise history as to why we went into Iraq.” “I don’t like to impugn anyone’s integrity, but I really don’t like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally,” said Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), in perhaps the strongest criticism of Rice. She “misled the people of Minnesota and Americans everywhere about the situation in Iraq, before and after that war began.” Byrd and other Democrats cited widely reported prewar public statements by Rice, such as, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” and “We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon,” citing a shipment of aluminum tubes, “that really are only suited for nuclear weapons programs.” The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed within the intelligence community. Critics also charged Rice had implied an Iraqi connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. “Dr. Rice’s statements in 2002 were not only wrong, they also did not accurately reflect the intelligence reports of the time,” Byrd said. Byrd said that Iraq was not planning to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction, and that that fact prompted the administration to apply a preventive war doctrine. “Under this strategy, the president lays claim to an expansive power, to use our military to strike other nations first even if we have not been threatened or provoked to do so,” he said. Rice, he said, “spoke out forcefully in favor of the dangerous doctrine of pre-emptive war” and said her confirmation “will almost certainly be viewed as another endorsement of the administration’s unconstitutional doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, its bullying policies of unilateralism, and its callous rejection of our longstanding allies.” The CIA’s Iraq Survey Group report last October concluded that Iraq did not have banned weapons prior to the war nor weapons programs, having destroyed them years earlier, and did not aspire to attack the United States. ‘Partisan Politics’Republicans and some senior Democrats defended Rice’s nomination. Senator John Warner (R-Va.) said he found “the personal attacks on her character and integrity … somewhat astonishing … particularly as it relates to her lifetime dedication to what we call here in the Senate the standards for truthfulness.” The essence of criticism of Rice, he said, “was that she has been less than truthful. It turned in large measure on this issue of weapons of mass destruction,” and Warner said he was assured by then Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet that “without a doubt” Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be discovered after the invasion. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) also faulted prewar intelligence, saying, “The truth is, we were all misled by this erroneous intelligence, and rather than point the finger of blame where no blame is due, what we ought to be about — and, indeed, what we have been doing — is correcting the reasons for that failure and making sure that it never happens again.” “I think our former director of the CIA is getting a bad rap here,” said Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who today voted for Rice after expressing reservations. Biden also said though he did not believe Rice had lied, but rather, that she had been misleading with characterizations about intelligence. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said today senators who had accused Rice of lying were being “political and personal.” Senator George Voinovich (R-Ohio), who voted to confirm, said “the administration has not been as candid and forthright with us during the last couple of years” and urged “more candor from this administration during the next four years.” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) gave an unreserved endorsement of Rice, and said “the key architects” of administration foreign policy “were, in fact, the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense.” “Barring serious questions about a nominee’s integrity and ability to serve, a president deserves to have his selections confirmed,” she said. Preventive War Debate PersistsCornyn praised the administration’s preventive war doctrine, and said its utility was demonstrated by Israel’s attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in the early 1980s. “The fact that Israel continues to exist today was in part because its leaders had the wisdom and courage to take on a growing threat by the use of pre-emptive action — sometimes called preventive self-defense — whenever it was necessary,” he said. Cornyn, also invoking the ISG report, argued that even in hindsight Iraq had posed a potential threat. He quoted a conclusion in the report that, “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capability — which was essentially destroyed in 1991 — after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized.” “It is beyond debate that Saddam continued to have the intent to acquire WMD and there is little doubt that but for our intervention and the fact that he was pulled from a spider hole and put in prison awaiting future accountability at the hands of the Iraqi people that he would have fully reconstituted his program just as soon as he was able,” he said. In addition to desiring such weapons, Cornyn suggested, Hussein sought such weapons for aggression. “In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush decided, with the authorization of Congress at every turn, that if diplomacy would not yield a pacified Saddam, that if the U.N. declined to enforce its own resolutions requiring inspections and disarmament, we would, when necessary, use pre-emptive action against those who seek to harm America and those who threaten world peace and supply sanctuary to terrorists,” he said. Byrd during his speech argued that while the U.S. intelligence community had judged Iraq to possess certain weapons of mass destruction, it did not consider probable that Hussein intended to use such weapons offensively against the United States. He cited declassified excerpts from an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that said the intelligence community had “low confidence” that Iraq “would use weapons of mass destruction,” “engage in clandestine attacks against the U.S. Homeland,” or “if sufficiently desperate,” because his regime was threatened, might share chemical or biological weapons with al-Qaeda. “The intelligence community had already addressed this scenario with great skepticism. …This is yet more evidence of an [administration] abuse of intelligence in order to build the case for an unprovoked war with Iraq,” Byrd said. The ISG report, following research and interviews of senior Iraqi officials during the ongoing U.S. occupation, concluded Hussein did not intend to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction and “did not consider the United States a natural adversary.”
| ||||||||||
Back to top
