Now that ’60 Minutes” has broadcast their interview with Saddam’s interrogator the inconvenient implications have been ignored by the media. It is easy to 2nd guess the Iraq war in hind-site and assume that since no WMDs were found and the occupation mismanaged that there was never a credible threat in the first place. This interview should remind us why the US Senate voted unanimously under Bill Clinton’s presidency that “Regime Change” was the stated policy of the United States. From the transcript:
Mr. Piro: “The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there.”
Mr. Pelley: “And that was his intention?”
Mr. Piro: “Yes.”
Mr. Pelley: “What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?”
Mr. Piro: “He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program.”
Mr. Pelley: “Chemical, biological, even nuclear.”
Mr. Piro: “Yes.”
Iraq’s active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn’t exactly news. The key point is Saddam’s admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.
Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being “contained” by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, “sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq].”
Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called “No-Fly Zones.” And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.