Comments fuel doubts over Iraq’s weapons

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As the Pentagon sent hundreds of new weapons hunters into Iraq and said it was changing how they would search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, critics expressed shock at published remarks by a senior U.S. official playing down those weapons as the reason for the war in the first place.

Critics of the war expressed shock at Wolfowitz’s published comments. “It leaves the world with one question: What should we believe?” former Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen told The Associated Press.

In Germany, where the war was widely unpopular, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said the comments showed that the United States was losing the battle for credibility. “The charge of deception is inescapable,” it said Friday.

“The war was sold on the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike, ‘Hit Saddam before he hits us,’” Cook told the British Broadcasting Corp. “It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have anything with which to hit us in the first place.”

The search for banned weapons has become a growing political headache for U.S. officials as more time passes and no weapons have been found.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meanwhile, was fighting his own battle against allegations that he fabricated evidence against Saddam after the BBC reported that an intelligence dossier had been altered at the request of his office to make it “sexier” by claiming that Saddam’s weapons could be readied for use within 45 minutes.

But Blair’s opponents seized on the latest report to blast the prime minister. “I believe the prime minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us,” said Tony Benn, a left-wing member of the Labor Party. “The whole war was built upon falsehood, and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

This isn't going way people. No way, no how.