WMD multiple choice

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Vanity Fair, Time and dozens of other commentators, politicians and flacks are leaping on the weapons of mass destruction story. Their premise: Bush administration officials suckered the American people into a war based on assertions they knew to be false.

Here's Time magazine: "How do you take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? ... If you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason -- something to stir up the folks back home." Now that's a rather breathtaking accusation when you stop to consider it. The Bush administration, motivated only by a desire to throw its weight around, concocts a false story about WMDs to "stir up" the folks back home.

We have been the occupying power in Iraq for about 10 weeks, and many of us thought we would have uncovered stockpiles of WMDs by now. But why are so many prepared, on this basis alone, to begin throwing around the accusation that the Bush administration lied to the world? At the very least, other explanations ought to be considered.

Let's start with the history. Saddam's nuclear ambitions go back at least to 1981, when Israel destroyed the (French-built) nuclear reactor at Osirak. Following the Gulf war, Iraq acknowledged it had resumed work on a nuclear bomb. As for chemical and biological weapons, the United Nations has confirmed Iraq's possession on multiple occasions.

The United Nations stated that "field tests of biological warfare agents started in late 1987/early 1988." In 1991, after surrendering to coalition forces, Iraq presented a list of its banned weapons to UNSCOM, the U.N. agency responsible for overseeing the cease-fire. Iraq then acknowledged some 10,000 nerve gas warheads, 1,500 chemical weapons, 412 tons of chemical weapons agents, 25 long-range missiles and more. Yet these proved to be understatements, as inspectors found more than these declared weapons.

Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqis did everything possible to frustrate the mission of UNSCOM -- hiding documents, playing cat and mouse, even on one occasion keeping the U.N. inspectors imprisoned in their cars in a parking lot outside a nuclear facility for four days.

In 1998, Saddam threw out the inspectors altogether, prompting President Clinton to launch a cruise missile attack on the Iraqi Republican guard. Our mission, Mr. Clinton explained to the American people, was to "attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs, and its capacity to threaten its neighbors."

Other countries had such weapons, Mr. Clinton continued, but "with Saddam there's one big difference; he has used them, not once but repeatedly -- unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops [and] against civilians ... ."

Ratcheting up the pressure in 2002, President Bush convinced the United Nations to resume inspections in Iraq. The purpose of these inspections was not to find Iraq's banned weapons, but to see proof that Iraq had, as it claimed, destroyed them. For weeks, U.N. inspectors drove to sites of previous WMD production and found nothing.