Bush did not have to hype Saddam threat

By JAMES KLURFELD
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
The great irony about the whole mess involving the Bush White House and the reasons for going to war against Iraq is that the exaggerations of the threats from Saddam Hussein were never necessary. There was a case to make for getting rid of Saddam based on the facts.
Instead, the White House felt it had to hype the threat. The result is a growing contention that the Bush White House got the United States into a war in which more than 2,000 of its soldiers have been killed for no good reason. The White House's credibility has been so damaged that it is difficult for President Bush to argue the United States must stay the course in Iraq.
The case that the president could have made was that after 10 years of being contained, Saddam was about to break out of the box he had been put into after the 1991 Gulf War. He had kicked out the arms inspectors, and the sanctions against him, which had already become significantly eroded, were about to be lifted. He would then be free to develop weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear, and there would be very little anybody could do to stop him.
Intelligence estimates
The president could have said that most of our intelligence community -- and that of the British, the French and the Israelis -- believed, but could not prove, Saddam did have biological and chemical weapons stashed away and that he would, within five to seven years, develop the ability to make nuclear weapons. Those intelligence estimates, the president could have said, were based on what was found in Iraq in 1991 after the U.S.-led invasion.
What would all this mean? Sooner or later Saddam could become the most powerful force in the Persian Gulf. He would control a huge chunk of the industrial world's oil supply. He could not only raise the price of oil, but also wreck our oil-dependent societies. Imagine our August 2003 blackout, but as a permanent condition, not a few days' disruption. All indications were he was radical enough to try it.
But the Bush administration felt it could not make an oil-for-blood argument. Rather, its top officials talked about the imminent threat of a mushroom cloud here (specious), linked Saddam to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attack on the United States (highly dubious), and, yes, cited as absolute fact uncertain reports of Iraq's attempts to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger -- the exaggeration that led to Lewis "Scooter" Libby's recent indictment.
Meglomaniac Saddam
You could have listened to the case for protecting our supply of oil and still not have concluded that it was wise or moral to launch a war against Saddam and occupy Iraq. But you would have had to offer an alternative to dealing with the unleashed, out-of-the-box, megalomaniac Saddam. Some did this, suggesting traditional deterrence. If Saddam tried to take over the supply of oil in the Persian Gulf, he would then face the U.S. military. Others, such as Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq expert now at the Brookings Institution, said Hussein could not be deterred. OK. But that would have set up a real debate. The administration wasn't willing to do that.
There is one silver lining in all this for the Bush administration. The Libby affair has overshadowed what should be the more critical issue: How the administration could have been so thoroughly unprepared to deal with the consequences of invading Iraq. History will judge the Bush administration far more harshly for the gross incompetence of how the post-invasion phase of the war was handled than for exaggerating intelligence. But at the moment it is the exaggerations, leaks and cover-ups that are damaging the second Bush term. It didn't have to be that way.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service