JB

Neil MacKay of the Sunday Herald reports:

The Bush administration has admitted that Saddam Hussein probably had no weapons of mass destruction.
Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America.

Bush claimed: 'Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We will find them.'

The comments from within the administration will add further weight to attacks on the Blair government by Labour backbenchers that there is no 'smoking gun' and that the war against Iraq -- which centred on claims that Saddam was a risk to Britain, America and the Middle East because of unconventional weapons -- was unjustified.

Pauline Jelinek of the Associated Press tells the story a little differently:

In the American hunt for Iraq's banned weapons, drums of suspicious chemicals turn out to be crop pesticide; a cache of white powder is found to be explosives.

More than six weeks into the Iraq campaign, there has been a string of false alarms but no discovery of what the Bush administration said was its main justification for going to war chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
....

"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there, and the evidence will be forthcoming,' Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

But after scores of fruitless searches, other administration officials privately have stopped promising that. Some now say that instead of finding weapons stockpiles, they might find nothing more than documents and other evidence that the program once existed and was either destroyed or abandoned.

"Politically, this could be a big problem,' said Paul Keer of the Arms Control Association, a Washington disarmament group. "If it turns out they ... exaggerated, people will say we attacked without justification some are starting to say that now.'

Before the war, administration officials did not just say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they also said they knew where some of them were.

In an unsuccessful bid for U.N. approval for the war, Powell showed the Security Council satellite photos and intelligence he said indicated weapons were being moved, and he named sites where he said chemical weapons were held.

"The intelligence community still stands behind that information. I do,' he said Sunday.

U.S.-led teams of military and civilian experts have reported finding nothing conclusive, however, after visiting most of some 100 sites that prewar American intelligence agencies said were the most probable hiding places. Hundreds more sites remain.

Expected intelligence from senior captured Iraqis who might have been most knowledgeable about the government's secrets is not materializing. One by one, they are insisting under interrogation that the government had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs in recent years, U.S. officials say.

Pentagon officials said just days before the war that they had intelligence that chemical weapons had been distributed to some Iraqi military units. None has been found.
....

Arguing for patience, Loren Thompson of the Washington- based Lexington Institute noted that U.N. inspections struggled with Iraq for a dozen years and could not find all they were looking for.

"I don't think the expectation was that this stuff would be sticking out like a sore thumb,' he said. "I think eventually they'll find the weapons, but the important point is that the government that would have thought to use them against us is gone.'

Some critics maintain that is not the point at all. They say the question always has been not whether Saddam had weapons, but whether those weapons were a big enough threat to the United States to justify war.

"If the Iraqis did not use them ... to defend an invasion of their own country, when were they ever going to use them, and how were they a threat to the United States?' asked Cato Institute's Pena. "That's the question that has to be asked and is being glossed over.'

I must confess I did not much trust the Bush Administration's stated reasons for going to war, which were ever changing. Many Americans will simply take comfort in knowing that we won a swift military victory and elminated a despicable tyrant. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that if the Administration is proved wrong about its central justification for going to war, that does not inspire much confidence in their foreign policy. Either they lied to us, or their intelligence isn't very good. Neither alternative is acceptable. I for one don't particularly like being lied to about why my government is using deadly force. And I don't like my government going off to war if its intelligence is as incompetent as it would have to have been to avoid the conclusion that we were being lied to. At some point, I fear, either the Administration's dishonesty or its intelligence failures will catch up with it. That can't be a good thing.

UPDATE: Ken Fireman reminds us about the President's stated justifications for war:

On March 17, with war in Iraq just 48 hours away, President George W. Bush laid out in clear and succinct terms the rationale for the military action he was about to unleash.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," the president said in a televised address to the nation from the White House.

"This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaida.

"The danger is clear. Using chemical, biological or - one day - nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people, in our country or any other."

Fireman continues:

U.S. officials now acknowledge that Hussein may have destroyed or transferred at least part of his alleged arsenal before the war began. No new evidence has been uncovered on Hussein-al-Qaida links to buttress an administration case that many analysts have long regarded as tenuous. And an Iraqi army that Washington repeatedly portrayed as a major security threat to the region proved to be incapable of defending its own territory, let alone waging offensive operations against a neighbor.

This state of affairs has led some foreign affairs analysts to conclude that the Bush administration had something else in mind when it planned, organized and launched the war: a high-profile demonstration of American military might and the political resolve to use it that would reverberate through the Middle East and beyond, causing governments as near as Syria and Iran and as far away as North Korea to recalibrate their actions.
...

"I think the president and other senior officials were captivated by the neoconservative vision of a world transformed by American military power," says Joseph Cirincione, an arms control expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It promised a quick, dramatic improvement in U.S. national security, and control of a critical global resource, that the United States could do completely on its own without bothersome multilateral bodies."

The question, in the minds of Cirincione and other like-minded experts, is whether an administration determined to remove Hussein from power grossly inflated his military capabilities in order to sell its policy to the public.

"It was the only way to get the American people to go to war against Iraq," Cirincione said. "You couldn't get the American people to go to war to free the Iraqi people and overthrow an evil regime, because there are lots of evil regimes in the world. So they cited two reasons: that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and Hussein had operational ties to al-Qaida.

"Neither appears to be true. I think this story is still developing. I think we're on the edge of realizing that this was either a massive intelligence failure - or a deliberate campaign to mislead the American people."

Say it isn't so, George, say it isn't so.