The “Bush Lied” crowd should be shutting up about now, but of course, they never will. The ancient platitudes about “Nixon’s secret war” have survived for four decades and so will the empty platitudes of this generation. However, the intellectual emptiness of the “Bush lied” crowd becomes more evident every day.
CBS’ 60 Minutes interviewed FBI agent George Piro who interrogated Hussein and buried in rhetoric the key part of the interview. In their on-line story, the conversation is on the 6th and final internet page, and it was glossed over in the TV broadcast.
In fact, Piro says Saddam intended to produce weapons of mass destruction again, some day. “The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” Piro says.
“And that was his intention?” Pelley asks.
“Yes,” Piro says.
“What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?” Pelley asks.
“He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program,” says Piro.
“Chemical, biological, even nuclear,” Pelley asks.
“Yes,” Piro says.
CNN admits that the threat from Hussein was imminent.
Hussein had the ability to restart the weapons program and professed to wanting to do that, Piro said.
“He wanted to pursue all of WMD … to reconstitute his entire WMD program.”
The Wall Street Journal comments on the story today in their “Review and Outlook“;
Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being “contained” by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, “sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq].”
Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called “No-Fly Zones.” And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.
Judging by the interview, it is safe to say that Hussein was, indeed, an imminent threat – since imminent means that sooner or later he’d be successful and he had the intent to rebuild his destructive weapons programs. Although it may be true that sanctions and inspections had contained him, it cannot be said that we could have maintained the No-Fly Zones, the failing sanctions or the weapons inspectors in perpetuity.
Not only were the Russians and French (and maybe the Germans) profiting from the oil-for-food scandal, the No-Fly Zone patrols were attacked frequently and inspectors were intermittently tossed out by Hussein when it suited him. Before George Bush influenced the UN to get their inspectors back in Iraq in 2002, Hussein had been free of inspectors since 1998.
Of course the media has focused on the “Hussein didn’t have WMDs” portion of the story and ignoring the fact that he had the means to eventually use these terrible weapons against his enemies. And we were one of those enemies.
