Bush ignores thrust of new WMD report

Photo: President Bush pauses as he makes a statement to reporters . (AP/Charles Darapak)

WASHINGTON, DC- Faced with a harshly critical new report, President George W. Bush conceded Thursday that Iraq did not have the stockpiles of banned weapons he warned about before the invasion last year, but insisted that "we were right to take (military) action." "America is safer today with Saddam Hussein in prison," Bush said in a surprise statement to reporters as he prepared to fly to Wisconsin. "Much of the accumulated body of our intelligence was wrong and we must find out why," Bush said. But, he argued, the Iraqi leader retained the "means and the intent" to produce weapons of mass destruction. Bush spoke one day after Charles Duelfer, the American weapons hunter in Iraq, presented to the Senate and the public a report saying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the U.S.-led invasion last year. The decline was wrought by the first Gulf War and years of international sanctions, the chief U.S. weapons hunter found. What ambitions Saddam harboured for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the United States or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel, the report found. Bush ignored the report in a hard-hitting new campaign speech attacking Kerry on Iraq Wednesday. He made his first public comments about the final document Thursday as he prepared to board his helicopter en route to Wisconsin for more campaigning. "The Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the UN oil for food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions," Bush said. "He was doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world looked away." "He could have passed that knowledge onto our terrorist enemies," Bush said. "Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, a sworn enemy of our country, a state sponsor of terror operating in the world's most volatile region. In the world after Sept. 11, he was a threat we had to confront and America and the world are safer for our actions."

Bush promised to act on the recommendations of the president's commission investigating flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, chaired by former senator Chuck Robb, a Virginia Democrat, and Republican Laurence Silberman, a senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. A spokesman for his opponent, Democrat John Kerry, said the report "underscores the incompetence of George Bush's Iraq policy." "George Bush refuses to come clean about the ways he misled our country into war," Kerry spokesman David Wade added. "In short, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.). Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group drew on interviews with senior Iraqi officials, 40 million pages of documents and classified intelligence to conclude that Iraq destroyed its undeclared chemical and biological stockpiles under pressure of UN sanctions by 1992 and never resumed production. Iraq ultimately abandoned its biological weapons programs in 1995, largely out of fear they would be discovered and tougher enforcement imposed. And Iraq also abandoned its nuclear program after the first Gulf war, and there was no evidence it tried to reconstitute it. Saddam's intentions to restart his weapons programs were never formalized. "The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions," the summary says. "Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policymakers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them." Duelfer's findings contradict most of the assertions by the Bush administration and the U.S. intelligence community about Iraq's threat in 2002 and early 2003. The White House had argued that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and production lines and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. Some 1,196 coalition personnel have been killed since the start of the war. Of those, 1,060 are American, 67 British and 69 are from other coalition countries. Unknown numbers of Iraqis have also died on both sides of the conflict. -J. Lupkin.