Iraq lesson: Long view was the key

It's time to take a deep breath and examine what David Kay's revelations really mean.

Kay is the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq who has concluded that Iraq had no chemical or biological weapons at the start of last year's Iraq war.

Iraq had no nukes, either, or any active program to make them. Nor is there any solid proof that Saddam had meaningful links with al-Qaeda. So was the U.S. public baldly misled by the Bush team into backing a war with Saddam to remove his unconventional weapons?

Yes and no.

Almost no one-not experts, former U.N. arms inspectors, Western intelligence agencies, or the Clinton administration-thought Iraq had destroyed "all its biological and chemical stocks. Imperfect estimates were based on weapons and materials that U.N. arms inspectors knew Iraq had produced but were not accounted for at the time inspections ended in 1998. (The much derided former U.N. inspector Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine, was one of few to argue that the weapons had been degraded or dismantled.)

Who knew Saddam would keep secret the one truth that might have prevented a U.S. invasion: He had destroyed his own weapons in order to elude U.N. arms inspectors in the 1990s. U.S. intelligence agencies, says Kay, were virtually clueless from 1998 to 2003, when there were no U.N. inspectors inside Iraq who could feed them information.

So one can't blame the administration for suspecting Iraq could still have tons of hidden chemicals or biological growth media. This is what the latest group of U.N. inspectors were searching for when their mission was aborted by the recent Iraq war.

But the administration turned a hypothetical into an urgent and absolute. On March 17, 2003, President Bush told the nation there was "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

And when it came to nukes, the hype went into overdrive. There was no good evidence Saddam's dismantled program had been restarted, little prospect of his getting a weapon within the decade unless he could buy fissile material on the black market.

Yet, on the war's eve, Vice President Cheney told NBC's "Meet the Press: "We believe Saddam has reconstituted nuclear weapons." (Six months later, the vice president admitted he "did misspeak. ... we never had any evidence that he had acquired a nuclear weapon.")

The misspeaking went on and on, most egregious being the president's 2003 State of the Union reference to Saddam's efforts to acquire "significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This information was based on forged documents about which the CIA had warned Vice President Cheney's office months earlier, after sending an investigator to Niger. The CIA was apparently pressured to sign off on the reference in the president's speech.

If you want chapter and verse on reality and hype about WMD in Iraq, I suggest reading the Carnegie Endowment's new report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications" at www.ceip.org. Just last week Vice President Cheney was still claiming that two semitrailers found in Iraq provided "conclusive evidence" of WMD programs, even though Kay knocked down that allegation.

Yes, the U.S. public was misled about the reasons for war.

But the White House WMD hype-and Kay's revelations about the absence of weapons-obscure the real threat that Saddam Hussein did present. The threat was not what Saddam had in 2003 but what he might have had years down the road.

It was clear to anyone who took the time to examine the evidence that Iraq's WMD threat wasn't urgent. The danger lay in the strong possibility that U.N. sanctions against Saddam would ultimately be removed. Had arms inspectors found Iraq to be WMD-free, international pressure would have mounted to lift the sanctions (this may have been Saddam's rationale for getting rid of his weapons). Once the Iraqi leader acquired renewed access to his oil billions, he surely would have tried to restart his weapons programs.

I don't believe he would have handed WMD off to terrorists. Not his style. It is much more likely that such weapons would be hawked by Pakistani nuclear scientists or North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

But Saddam with nukes would have been a great danger to the Mideast, which is crucial to American interests. A more honest argument from the White House would have been that the Saddam threat was long-term and had to be contained long-term. There were two options: Retain U.N. sanctions against Iraq as long as Saddam remained in power. Or use force-with or without U.N. sanction-to overturn a despot who had, after all, defied the United Nations. But use force to depose him as an international pariah, and not as the first test of a U.S. doctrine of preemptive war.

This case would have been a hard sell to the U.N. Security Council-and a much harder sell to the American public. But it would have been the truth. And a responsible leader could have made it, and made it strongly.

Instead, embellished stories of Iraqi WMD as a pretext for war will undermine U.S. credibility in the future. David Kay blames U.S. intelligence flaws, but the fault lies as much with White House spin.