Saddam Hussein's Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction - a certainty cited repeatedly by US and UK government officials.
No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. The intelligence was flawed, misrepresented, and in some cases fabricated. The Iraq Survey Group concluded Saddam had ended his WMD programs in 1991.
What changed?
Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. For seventy-five minutes, he presented satellite images, intercepted communications, and intelligence assessments that he said proved beyond reasonable doubt that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons and was pursuing a nuclear program. "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
The assessment was presented as settled. The intelligence community's consensus, as characterized by the administration, was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the question was not whether but where and how many. President Bush's 2003 State of the Union had cited British intelligence reports that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. The National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 had concluded that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. Certainty had become the rhetorical register of official communication on the subject.
The invasion began March 20, 2003. Saddam Hussein's government fell in April. Coalition forces began searching. They found nothing.
The Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-person task force assembled to find the weapons, concluded in its September 2004 final report that Iraq had ended its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs in 1991 following the first Gulf War. The regime had not restarted them. There were no stockpiles. There was no active program. Hussein had maintained ambiguity about whether he had weapons partly to deter Iran, a bluff that led the United States to invade and cost him his government and eventually his life.
Powell later called his UN presentation "a blot" on his record, saying he had been given bad intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee found in 2004 that the intelligence community's judgments were "overstated" and "not supported by the underlying intelligence." The certainty that had been presented to students in civics classes and to the public in official briefings had no factual foundation. The consequences, tens of thousands of dead, a destabilized Middle East, a trillion-dollar war, followed from a mistake presented as certainty.
