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This essay argues that, if carefully read, the public statements of the Bush administration in the run-up to the March 2003 U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq reveal that the available evidence did not warrant the administration's confident claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To support this argument, the essay explores the administration's verbal leakage and Freudian slips, shifts in the burden of proof, strategies that minimized evidentiary accountability, assertions of the presence of convincing evidence that could not be publicly revealed, and tacit concessions that the case for WMD was a patchwork.
Half a year after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the disparity between prewar intelligence reports and the public case made by the Bush administration was clear. After reviewing 19 volumes of material, holding closeddoor hearings, and making oversight trips to Iraq over a four-month period, in September 2003 House Intelligence Committee chair Republican Porter Goss and the committee's ranking Democrat, Jane Harman, concluded in a letter to CIA Director George Tenet: "The intelligence available to the U.S. on Iraq's possession of WMD and its programs and capabilities relating to such weapons after 1998, and its links to al-Qa'ida, was fragmentary and sporadic." The letter also noted, "The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered as proof that they continue to exist."1
Press reports confirmed that the administration's case for war did not accurately represent the available intelligence. More than a year after the United States intervened militarily to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the New York Times produced a multipage special report titled "Skewed Intelligence on Iraq Colored the March to War." Among other things the report revealed that while the vice president "said he knew 'for sure' and 'in fact' and 'with absolute certainty' that Mr. Hussein was buying equipment to build a nuclear weapon," the CIA reports were saying "evidence 'suggested' or 'could mean' or 'indicates.'" In short, "[t]he intelligence community had not yet concluded that Iraq had indeed reconstituted its nuclear program."2 In the run-up to the war, of course, the public and the press could not test the administration's words against these intelligence documents.
With central parts of the Bush...