Invisible arsenal / The case against spending more to search Iraq [View All]

Editorial: Invisible arsenal / The case against spending more to search Iraq
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03283/229711.stm

The Iraq Survey Group, a 1,200-person team that has spent the past three months searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, provided an interim report to Congress last week. The group, led by David Kay, said it had found no evidence that Iraq possessed such weapons.

Dr. Kay is a former arms inspector of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He reports to George Tenet, director of central intelligence. The survey group's work was preceded by a months-long search carried out by a military team, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which also found nothing.

The Iraq Survey Group concluded, based on its research so far, that Iraq wanted to produce biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, and that it had retained some capacity to continue to try to produce them, but that no such weapons existed in its arsenal when the United States attacked.

The military task force and the survey group had had relatively free rein to search anywhere and question anyone they liked in Iraq for about five months and had spent some $300 million looking. Nonetheless, Dr. Kay has presented a request to Congress on the part of the Bush administration asking for another $600 million to pursue the quest for another six to nine months.

President Bush's comment on Dr. Kay's report was that the evidence of Saddam Hussein's interest in and efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction indicated that he was a serious danger to the world and thus needed to be eliminated.

But the survey's negative report exposes the severe flaws in the prewar intelligence used to support the decision to go to war and to sell the proposition to the American people. Besides, other questions now present themselves.

One is why the U.N. team that carried out the prewar inspections hasn't been brought into the current effort. That team has both information and considerable experience working in Iraq. Its involvement also would give more international credibility to whatever results are presented by the survey team. The second question is why the United States should spend another $600 million to search for evidence when nothing significant was found in five months of investigation by a team of more than a thousand people that has already cost $300 million.

The quest looks more and more political -- an effort to justify the questionable actions of an administration that took the United States into a war with Iraq that continues to cost lives and money. Without expressly saying so, the Kay report makes a strong argument that the continued search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq should be put back where it belongs -- perhaps where it always belonged -- in the hands of the International Atomic Energy Agency.