The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
President George W. Bush came under fire last month for now infamously joking about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Whether the jest was in bad taste is a matter that has sparked plenty of debate, but not nearly as much as the truth on which the President based the comment. Where are those WMD that so many people were certain Saddam Hussein had in his evil grasp? While some believe the weapons were destroyed, moved out of the country, or will still be found Ñ Iraq is a big place Ñ most seem to conclude that the deadly stockpiles never actually existed. That's naturally given the anti-Bush movement within the United States (and abroad) ammunition to label their target a bona fide falsifier. No weapons means that he must have hyped the intelligence, exaggerated the threat, and misled the world, they claim. But love him or hate him, Bush may not be the one to blame. Just ask the most unlikely of Dubya defenders, former President Bill Clinton. "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for . . . it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks," Clinton said of Iraq last summer on Larry King Live. Moreover, Clinton revealed that he never learned whether his 1998 Iraq bombing campaign destroyed Saddam's stockpiles of, or capability of producing, chemical and biological weapons. The same people who call Bush a liar on the WMD issue don't dare apply that term to Clinton. A double standard exists because Clinton, who had the luxury of serving prior to 9/11, didn't go to war, and, of course, because Bush critics are normally Clinton followers. Presidents aren't intelligence gatherers; that's the job of intelligence people. When terrorists struck the United States on September 11, Saddam and WMD had to be taken much more seriously. How could they not? It's discomforting to think, particularly in the midst of the war on terror, that the evidence about the ousted dictator's weapons was incorrect. But relying on that evidence does not make Clinton, Bush or anyone else a liar.
