by Jeremy Hammond

Created on: September 12, 2008

In examining the question of whether U.S. forces should remain in Iraq, it's important to look at not only the reasons given for why they must stay, but also at the justification given for the war in the first place.

The United States invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to our national security because he possessed weapons of mass destruction and had a relationship with terrorist groups, including al Qaeda.

This pretext was never credible. Contrary to popular myth, there was no "intelligence failure" leading up to the war. The simple fact of the matter is that there never was any credible evidence that Iraq still possessed WMD, or that Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship with al Qaeda. Indeed, the known facts available at the time contradicted these assertions.

Iraq, it was said, possessed chemical and biological weapons and was on its way towards obtaining a nuclear weapon. While President Bush and others in his administration touted the "threat" from Iraq, conjuring up images of "a mushroom cloud" that could be "the smoking gun" that Saddam possessed a nuclear bomb, the fact - perfectly well known to anyone with any knowledge of the subject, such as those in the intelligence community and the White House - was that Iraq's nuclear program had been completely dismantled by the International Atomic Energy Agency by as early as 1992. By 1998, the IAEA reported its confidence that in its efforts it had not missed any significant aspect of the program.

But administration officials said that Saddam had reconstituted the nuclear program since U.N. and IAEA inspectors left in 1998. The evidence for this, they said, was that Iraq had tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Africa. There were several problems with this claim. First, Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake. But this was under lock and seal of the IAEA, so the argument was that Saddam wanted to obtain more that could be employed in a nuclear program without the IAEA knowing about it. That was credible, of course, except for the fact that obtaining yellowcake would require Iraq to enrich the uranium to weapons grade itself, and Iraq simply had no capability of doing so.

This hole in their argument precipitated the claim that Iraq had attempted to obtain aluminum tubes for use in uranium enrichment centrifuges. The tubes, we were told, were suitable for this task, and this task only.

The only problem with that claim was that it was an absolute falsehood. Not only did

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