Hunting Iraq's Weapons

Wednesday, June 4, 2003; Page A26

PRESIDENT BUSH'S claim last week that U.S. forces in Iraq already "have found the weapons of mass destruction" has made a difficult problem for the administration worse. In fact, no Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons have been located, though a couple of mobile laboratories likely constructed for producing banned biological agents have been found. It still is possible -- we'd say probable -- that weapons will be found. After all, coalition forces haven't found Saddam Hussein or his sons, either, but they or their remains surely do exist; conditions in Iraq remain chaotic, and American control over large parts of the country is still tenuous. But Mr. Bush's attempt to dismiss the WMD issue, like his equally premature description of the Iraq war as a mission accomplished, has damaged U.S. credibility abroad and raised troubling questions about the administration's intentions.

Many critics of the war have rushed to the conclusion that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction and that the Bush administration falsified or deliberately hyped the evidence. This seems unlikely on both counts. Saddam Hussein was proven to have biological and chemical arms during the 1990s. He repeatedly refused to provide evidence that he had destroyed them, even when the survival of his regime was at stake. Not only was the Bush administration convinced that weapons and weapons programs continued: The Clinton administration publicly stated the same conclusion, as did the governments of Britain and France. In December the U.N. Security Council concluded, by a vote of 15 to 0, that Iraq was in "material breach" of repeated U.N. orders to disarm. That conclusion may be proven wrong, but if so the error was shared by two U.S. administrations and most of the world's intelligence community.

So did the administration deliberately overstate the threat? Some of the claims tossed off by Vice President Cheney and other senior officials in the heat of the debate appear unlikely to be borne out. But the administration's most serious presentation of its case -- delivered by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the Security Council on Feb. 5 -- still looks pretty strong. Mr. Powell offered detailed evidence of Iraqi acts of concealment and deception. He repeated U.N. accounts of chemical and biological agents that Iraq had not accounted for. He described at length the biological labs that have since been found and offered other reports of weapons systems and attempts to acquire nuclear materials. His estimate that "Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent" has yet to be confirmed -- but neither that claim nor most of the other assertions in his presentation have been contradicted.

Saddam Hussein openly defied the United Nations on a critical security matter: weapons of mass destruction. To shrink from responding to his violations even after the events of 9/11 would have gravely damaged international order and U.S. security. By acting, the United States made clear that the proliferation of such weapons to rogue states will not be tolerated, removed the most dangerous regime in the Arab Middle East and ended the criminal repression of millions of Iraqis. Yet that hardly means the Bush administration can now play down the question of weapons. It is vital to prevent any such arms from falling into the hands of terrorists or other rogue states. And it is crucial to the administration's ability to tackle the threat of WMD in other rogue states that it show the world proof of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. If U.S. intelligence was wrong, it is important to learn why. If administration officials misused intelligence, that also should be made clear. What's needed is careful and patient investigation, open to audit by Congress and U.N. inspectors. Hasty conclusions, either by the president or his critics, won't serve.