May/June 2003, Volume 59, No. 3, pp. 26-33
Iraq: A necessary war?
By John Prados
Not according to U.N. monitors-or to U.S. intelligence, which has watched the situation even more carefully.
For months the Bush administration treated the world to a series of lurid claims about the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. By far the most expansive description of the threat was made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech before the U.N. Security Council on February 5. In a presentation replete with satellite photos and artists' conceptions, Powell argued that Iraq posed an ominous and urgent threat.
But was the Iraqi threat as imminent as advertised? And how did these versions of the Iraqi menace accord with what the public had previously been told? And what about the Iraqi threat required the rush to war?
Americans in particular need to consider what it all means. Despite administration assertions, the threat was by no means self-evident. Bush officials, except where it suited their interests, have discounted the findings of international inspectors who for most of a decade monitored Iraqi weapons programs.
And how different does the picture look if one focuses instead on the other authoritative source on Iraqi weapons issues-the U.S. intelligence community, which has followed Iraqi developments at least as keenly as U.N. monitoring teams?
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2003/mj03/mj03prados.html