O'Neill and WMD: fallout beyond Iraq

Two days before launching the war in Iraq, a resolute President Bush went on national television to tell the American people, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Less than a year later, the Iraq regime the president warned about is gone, and the Bush administration is busy tallying what it considers are the positive dividends of the war. What it cannot claim, however, is that the war spared the US and the world the imminent threat of "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." The reason: the weapons have not been found.

Evidence is mounting that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) existed at best on paper and compact disk. The Bush administration has responded by shifting its rationale for war, which it executed largely without foreign support.

The administration is now emphasizing the threat posed by a vicious and megalomaniacal dictator, rather than the imminent threat of WMD. It is also facing fresh accusations that it was bent on deposing Mr. Hussein virtually from the day Bush first took office.

The administration's postwar shift in rationale, and its alleged deep-seated obsession with toppling Hussein, appears to matter little to the American public.

But Bush's failure to show to the world evidence of the imminent threat posed by Iraq will alter the future exercise of American foreign policy, analysts say.

The way in which foreign intelligence is gathered and presented could also change, as experts call for a full inquiry into the Iraq intelligence file, and for major changes in the US intelligence arena.

The nation's approach to addressing acts of terror might also shift, say experts.

"This is going to matter to history, it will matter the next time there's a crisis [like Iraq], and it will matter if there is a Lebanon-type disaster in Iraq," says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, referring a truck bomb that killed 241 Marines in 1983.

But Mr. Korb, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, adds that "short of that the whole world is saying we're better off without Saddam, and if even the opposition party is split on the topic, it's hard to make it an issue."

The renewed attention to Bush's rationale for war was prompted by revelations in a new book about former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's experience in the administration.

In the book and in interviews, Mr. O'Neill claims that, in his capacity as a member of the president's war cabinet, he never saw any evidence that the former Iraq regime possessed WMD. He also claims that from the new administration's first cabinet meeting in 2001, the president directed staff to begin looking at means of removing Hussein.

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