JB

The Washington Post reports that Task Force 75, "the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons," is winding down operations and preparing to leave Iraq next month, unable to find any weapons of mass destruction.

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."
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Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves missing vital tools. They consistently found targets identified in Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both.

Even as Task Force 75 is winding down operations with little hope of finding weapons of mass destruction, the Administration is insisting that the search has just begun. In his statement of victory aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, President Bush asserted that the search was only in its initial stages, with hundreds of sites to be investigated.

I well understand the need of the Administration to save face about coming up short in its major justification for sending American troops into combat. But at some point the Administration should feel some compunction to be more honest with the American public about what it is doing. It seems increasingly clear that the war in Iraq will have to be justified in hindsight for reasons other than the Administration said it would be fought. The justification will be the creation of a democratic republic in Iraq rather than stopping the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. It is unlikely that the public would have supported the war without the Administration's confident assurances that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that someday would pose a threat to the United States. Those confident assurances appear to have been overconfident. As a result, the Administration is hoping that the fact of a decisive victory will paper over serious concerns about the honesty of its representations to the American people and the reliability of its weapons intelligence.