JB

Courtesy of Sky News and Daily Kos:

"We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction - that is what this war was about, and is about - and we have high confidence it will be found."

Paul Wolfowitz, however, begs to differ:

Q: There was an article published yesterday in Vanity Fair which quoted you as saying that weapons of mass destruction were chosen for bureaucratic reasons to justify war in Iraq.

Wolfowitz: I'm sorry, first of all, that isn't even the way the article puts it, but if you want to know what I actually said I would suggest you read the transcript of the interview which is on our website. What I said very clearly is that we have from the beginning had three concerns. One was weapons of mass destruction, second was terrorism, and the third -- and all three of these by the way are in Secretary Powell's presentation at the U.N. -- the third was the abuse of Iraqis by their own government. And in a sense there was a fourth overriding one, which was the connection between those first two, the connection between the weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. All three of those have been there, they've always been part of the rationale and I think it's been very clear.

I am willing to take Wolfowitz at his word: the issue was not just WMD in Saddam's hands, but the connection between WMD and international terrorism. Yet the question then becomes whether the Iraqi invasion helped prevent terrorist organizations from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction, or actually made it easier to do so. Because we have not found the WMD, there are two troubling possibilities: The first is that, as Secretary Rumsfeld suggests, the weapons had been destroyed before the war, in which case our invasion was based on faulty intelligence. Then we have done nothing to hinder terrorist organizations from gaining weapons of mass destruction, but we have stoked additional resentment and possibly added to the ranks of our enemies. The second possibility, which is even more troubling, is that by attacking Iraq we created anarchy that allowed weapons of mass destruction to move outside the country and into the hands of international terrorist organizations. That suggests that given the major reason for the war, the war itself was counterproductive.