No WMDs in Iraq? Why it matters: the Bush administration insisted that we must go to war because Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat. Surprise! It was really a war to strengthen the UN.

David Kay's disclosures touched off a firestorm. After retiring on January 23 as the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, Dr. Kay reported that not only did his teams fail to discover any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) but that he now believes the weapons didn't exist when President Bush launched the war against Iraq in March 2003.

As to be expected in an election year, the Kay revelations stoked the already-burning political debate about whether the administration cooked intelligence reports to make Saddam's WMD threat appear large enough and imminent enough to justify going to war.

Partisan wrangling over this issue has almost completely obscured what is perhaps the most important and alarming development to come out of the Iraq War: a major boost for the United Nations.

Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press special correspondent covering WMD-related issues for the past two decades, is one of the few reporters who have put two and two together. In a January 25 article entitled, "Iraq WMD Flap May Bolster U.N. Position," Mr. Hanley wrote:

   Whatever the political backlash in
   election-year America, the U.S. retreat
   on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
   signals a victory in the larger
   fight to control the deadliest of
   weapons. Sanctions and inspections,
   the United Nations and global teamwork
   appear to have worked in curbing
   Iraq's ambitions.

Hanley went on to note that:

   Kay had concluded that years of earlier
   U.N. inspections had "got rid off"
   weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
   "The weapons do not exist," he told
   National Public Radio.

   That finding, if accepted in the corridors
   of power in Washington, may
   help revive a unified, U.N.-led strategy
   on arms proliferation, a strategy in
   which economic pressure, diplomacy
   and inspectors supplant the threat of
   unilateral U.S. attack. In North Korea,
   Iran and wherever else WMD ambitions
   may grow, Kay's words could
   help clear the way again for a
   peaceful approach to arms
   control.

Empowering the UN

Hanley's point deserves emphasis: It was, he says, years of UN inspections that "got rid of" Saddam's WMDs. And the "peaceful approach to arms control," he implies, is an expanded, empowered global UN inspection regime. That inspection regime is expected, ultimately, to have authority to inspect all U.S. weapons sites or possible weapons sites as well.

Mr. Hanley is not alone in this analysis. We would do well to pay attention to Robert Wright on this score as well. Professor Wright, an unflinching advocate of world government, noted in a New York Times column last year that President Bush, despite his seeming anti-UN rhetoric, has bestowed upon the UN "a prominence it has rarely enjoyed in its 57-year history." "In fact," Professor Wright mused, "there remains a slim chance that the president could, however paradoxically, emerge as a historic figure in the United Nations' own evolution toward enduring significance." Wright's point that "if Nixon could go to China, President Bush can go through New York," was especially telling.

For those too young to understand the significance of the professor's Nixon-China reference, it was President Richard Nixon, a reputed conservative Republican, who sold out Taiwan, our anti-Communist ally, leading to its expulsion from the UN, and its replacement in that world body by Communist China. And it was the same Nixon, who had built a reputation as an anti-Communist and an opponent of Red China, who went to Beijing and paved the way for completely reversing U.S. policy and establishing relations with Mao's Communist regime. Those betrayals more than three decades ago started the massive loans, aid and technology transfers that have transformed Red China into the global economic and military power that now poses one of the greatest dangers to our lives and livelihoods. Liberal-left, internationalist Democrats such as Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern lamented at the time that Nixon had stolen the Democrats' program and was being applauded for actions that would have earned them brickbats from the same audience. Robert Wright, speaking for many in the one-world corner, sees George Bush doing for the UN what Nixon did for China.

Paul Robinson of Britain's Center for Security Studies has weighed in with a similar analysis. Writing last October in the London Spectator, Mr. Robinson observed that "the United Nations, far from being humiliated by recent events, could well emerge invigorated." Commenting on the Bush administration's appeal to the Security Council for material and military aid in Iraq, he noted: "The more America has to backtrack and summon help from the UN, the more it will be the latter which will be seen as the winner in the power struggle between the two...." In sum, said Robinson, the probable outcome of the U.S.-led war in Iraq is that "the legitimacy of the United Nations will not be weakened but strengthened; and the constraints on American power will be tightened, not removed."

Indeed, in his September 23, 2003 address to the UN General Assembly, President Bush proudly announced that he was working with allies to "expand the U.N.'s role in Iraq." This included, he said, a central role for the UN "in developing a constitution, in training civil servants, and conducting free and fair elections." And, of course, there's also the biggest and most coveted political plum for the UN: administering huge amounts of U.S.-supplied financial and humanitarian aid for Iraq.

Architects of Betrayal

The plan to betray the Republic of China on Taiwan and embrace Communist China did not originate with Nixon. That was the work of Henry Kissinger, a staff member of the Rockefeller-ran Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Soon after his election, Nixon betrayed the conservatives who elected him and loaded up his administration with over 100 of Kissinger's fellow one-worlders from the CFR. Likewise, President Bush's program to build up the UN is being scripted by the usual gang from Pratt House, the CFR's New York headquarters. Heading the Bush CFR contingent (along with Vice President Dick Cheney) is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who outlined the administration's internationalist agenda in the January/February 2004 issue of the CFR's journal Foreign Affairs.

In his essay, "A Strategy of Partnerships," Secretary Powell explained that President Bush, despite popular perception to the contrary, is actually very supportive of the UN. "Above all, the president's strategy is one of partnerships that strongly affirms the vital role of NATO and other U.S. alliances--including the UN," Powell wrote. "Don't believe it?" he asked. "Perhaps," he noted, "this is because the commentariat widely claimed that the president's recent decision to seek a new UN Security Council resolution on the postwar reconstruction of lraq was a sharp break with policy."

Commenting on that illusion, Powell reminded his elite audience that "month after month" the administration had endorsed and supported UN resolutions relative to Iraq and had called on the world body to enforce its own resolutions. And, as we have pointed out repeatedly in these pages, the speeches and actions of President Bush and his top Cabinet officials, in stark contrast to occasional anti-UN rhetorical jabs, have clearly shown the Bush administration is aiming to establish the UN's legitimacy and legal authority as a given within the Republican Party.

In many speeches and press conferences President Bush himself reiterated his support for the UN and stated that the reason for going to war was to uphold and enforce UN Security Council resolutions. He stated, for instance, in an October 31, 2002 speech in South Dakota: "I went to the United Nations a while ago because I want the United Nations to be effective.... It makes sense for there to be an international body that has got the backbone and the capacity to help keep the peace.... The message to the world is that we want the U.N. to succeed. We want those resolutions you pass to be listened to."

A few days later, on November 8th, the day UN Security Council Resolution 1441 to disarm Iraq was passed, Mr. Bush stated: "America will be making only one determination: is Iraq meeting the terms of the Security Council resolution or not? ... If Iraq fails to comply, the United States and other nations will disarm Saddam Hussein."

In his September 12, 2002 speech to the UN General Assembly, President Bush declared that the "conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations." "Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance," he said. Bush asked: "Arc Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant'? ... We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced?" (Emphasis added.)

Over and over again, throughout 2002 and 2003, the president repeated this message, asserting that we must "not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society." Taking up this theme again, during a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors on January 23, 2004, Bush declared: "We want international institutions to work." But Saddam was ignoring the UN's demands, he complained. "And the more he ignored them," said Bush, "the weaker the United Nations became." It is time, said the president, for the UN "to be a credible body." Obviously, then, U.S. arms and troops, ships and planes, blood and treasure had to be rushed into Iraq to strengthen the UN's all important "credibility."

Psychological Reversal

That, however, was not the public perception of why we were going to war. The White House speechwriters cleverly intertwined the president's paeans of praise for the supposed glorious mission of the UN with rebukes of the UN for failing to put teeth behind its resolutions and risking irrelevancy. In an astonishingly brazen exercise in psychological reversal, they disguised a pro-UN campaign to strengthen multilateralism in a cloak of unilateralism. They harnessed patriotism and national anger over the 9-11 terror attacks to push an internationalist agenda.

The deception has worked very well. Most Americans who supported (and still support) President Bush's war in Iraq did so (and do so) in the belief that it is a .just war against the terrorists who attacked America--against al-Qaeda, and against a regime that supported those terrorists.

Too few of these Americans actually read the president's speeches, or listened to them carefully and critically. Those who did would have recognized the real objective hidden in plain sight in the administration's intentionally tangled message. As William Norman Grigg noted in these pages just before the president launched the war, "The president and his subordinates have made their intent transparently clear: The impending war on, or occupation of, Iraq is intended to carry out the UN Security Council's mandates, not to protect our nation or to punish those responsible for the September 11th attack. The war would uphold the UN's supposed authority and vindicate its role as a de facto world government."

Yes, this intent was transparently clear--to those who remained unbeguiled by the president's carefully crafted simultaneous appeals to nationalism, sovereignty, unilateralism--and scorn for UN inaction. During a November 3, 2002 campaign swing through Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for instance, President Bush declared that "if the United Nations can't act ... the United States will lead a coalition of nations to disarm Saddam Hussein." This was the cue for the audience to erupt in a deafening chant of "USA! USA! USA!" This amazing scene was repeated many times throughout the country, as the administration manipulated patriotic fervor in the service of globalism.

However, it's one thing to get the party troops psyched up at a stump speech, and another to get a majority of Congress and the electorate to sign onto war. To get the war wagon rolling, one needs a credible casus belli. The Bush administration could never have successfully argued the case that the U.S. must wage war on Saddam to benefit the UN. No, instead, it submerged that message within vague charges and repeated inferences that Saddam Hussein was the power behind the 9-11 attacks on America (without actually saying it), and that he was ready to strike again with weapons of mass destruction.

If it were true that Iraq had sponsored the September 11 terror attacks, the U.S. would have been fully justified in declaring war on Saddam's regime. But the administration offered no proof of the Saddam-September 11 connection. The Bush war apparat placed its big gamble on a strategy of convincing the American public and world opinion that Saddam Hussein possessed a huge arsenal of WMDs and that there was an imminent danger that he would use them against the U.S. and other countries.

Party Lines

Which brings us back to David Kay. The political powers have been spinning the Kay revelations to keep public reaction within the predictable--and controlled--party lines. The Democrats and their media allies smell blood. Presidential candidate Howard Dean told CNN that Kay's report shows the Bush administration "clearly tried to gin up every piece of intelligence to try to get us to go into that war." Robert Scheer, a red-diaper baby and 1960s street radical who writes for the Los Angeles Times, asked in a January 27 column: "Now can we talk of impeachment?" According to Scheer, David Kay's admissions prove "that the Bush administration is complicit in arguably the greatest scandal in US history."

Republican reaction, likewise, has been totally partisan. The GOP's top radiomeister, Rush Limbaugh, shored up the party faithful with this January 29 bombast:

   I mean, I can tell you right now that
   the Democrats will try to exploit
   everything about Iraq. Democrats like
   Carl Levin, Ted Kennedy and Tom
   Daschle looked more energized while
   grilling weapons inspector David Kay
   into changing his mind and blaming
   Bush than they have since Iran-Contra.
   Hatred and fanning is what
   animates them.

Where it concerns Bush, Saddam and WMDs, "the Democrats are too hate-filled and irrational," Rush insists.

Granted, we are plagued by Democrats who would gleefully impeach President Bush for stubbing his toe on the Oval Office sofa, and by Republicans who would blindly follow Bush lemming-like into the abyss of Hades. Surely, however, there must be a majority of Americans who consider themselves Americans first, and who will put the interests of country above the party loyalty and cult of personality that have exemplified American politics for far too many decades. And for those Americans who do hold country, the Constitution and national security above partisan politics, the Kay admissions should matter a great deal.

Dr. Kay is not some anti-Bush Clintonite; in fact, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee and in media interviews, he has defended President Bush's decision to go to war and stated that the president was misled by faulty intelligence from various agencies. Team Bush, however, is now engaged in an astounding spasm of Clintonesque denial and revisionism. The president, his Cabinet and his spokesmen now act as if they had never claimed that Saddam possessed actual weapons of mass destruction. They even deny having claimed that there was an imminent danger of Saddam using WMDs against us.

Following the Kay revelations, the Bush administration slid into the Clinton mode of arguing that it depends "on what the definition of 'is' is." In his January 20 State of the Union address, President Bush stated: "Already, the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities...." Please note the switch from WMDs to WMD "related program activities."

Disappearing Arsenals

This change from actual WMDs to WMD programs and activities is no trifling distinction, as the president's spinmeisters would have us believe. When Team Bush was pounding the war drums, it was stating very emphatically not only that Saddam had these weapons in hand, but that he would surely use them against us soon, or give them to a terrorist group that would do so. Delaying our assault on Saddam's regime would be tantamount to inviting another 9-11, we were told.

In his February 5, 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Powell stated:

   Our conservative estimate is that Iraq
   today has a stockpile of between 100
   and 500 tons of chemical weapons
   agent.... Even the low end of 100 tons
   of agent would enable Saddam Hussein
   to cause mass casualties across
   ... an area nearly five times the size
   of Manhattan.

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more," Powell continued. "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world," he insisted.

That sounds pretty definite, right? Well, that was then. This is now, and Powell is trying to rewrite history. Now he says only that "we thought" Saddam may have had WMDs. On January 24 of this year, when asked about his 2003 UN statement, Powell responded that "we were not only saying that we thought they had them, but we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it: one hundred tons, five hundred tons or zero tons?" Wait, wait, wait. Zero tons? Where does that come from? When he addressed the UN, he wasn't asking questions, be was issuing an indictment, claiming that Saddam was in illegal possession of a "conservative estimate" of 100-500 tons of chemical weapons agent.

During his March 17, 2003 address to the nation, President Bush warned: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

In his September 12, 2002 UN speech, the president had gone even further, making the outlandish claim that Iraq, somehow, was a uniquely evil and dangerous threat. He claimed "our greatest fear" is that an outlaw regime will supply terrorists "the technologies to kill on a massive scale." Then came this clincher: "In one place--in one regime--we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms, exactly the kind of aggressive threat the United Nations was born to confront...."

But David Kay's report cut the feet out from under such hyperbolic one-world blather.

On January 27, Team Bush rolled out a new take on the Iraq-WMD problem. Asked about the apparent absence of imminent threat, since, apparently, no Iraqi WMDs existed at the time of the U.S. invasion, Bush responded: "There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a grave and gathering threat to America and the world." (Emphasis added).

On the same day, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan played the same semantic game of gathering/grave vs. imminent. A reporter noted "the essence of Dr. Kay's comments recently would suggest that there was no way for there to be an imminent threat."

McClellan responded: "I think we've said all along that it was a grave and gathering threat. And that in a post-September 11th world, you must confront gathering threats before it's too late." The administration hadn't used the term "imminent threat," McClellan stated. "Those were not words we used," he said. "We used 'grave and gathering threat.' We made it very clear that it was a gathering threat...."

In reality, the administration's statements over the past several years were replete with explicit and implied assertions that Saddam Hussein posed a very imminent threat.

At a May 7, 2003 press briefing, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer responded to a reporter's question concerning the failure to find WMDs in Iraq. "Well," asked the reporter, "we went to war, didn't we, to find these--because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States'? Isn't that true?" To which Mr. Fleischer responded: "Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction...."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (former CFR) was unequivocal on the matter when testifying before Congress in September 2002. "No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq," he charged. In a January 2003 CNN broadcast, White House spokesman Dan Bartlett was asked if Saddam posed an "imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans fight here at home." He responded: "Well, of course he is."

The Price of Deception

Where has the war in Iraq led us thus far? In addition to the mounting losses in lives and dollars and the stretching of our military resources to the breaking point, the Iraqi quagmire is proving to be a huge blow to U.S. unilateralism and an enormous boon to United Nations multilateralism.

This is so because of the carefully nurtured public perception that President Bush had acted unilaterally and that the alternative to unilateral action is multilateral action under the UN--spreading the burden of "peacekeeping" and "peace-making" and ensuring that no nation, not even the United States, operates outside the global collective will. The correct alternative--abiding by the U.S. Constitution and going to war only when necessary to defend our homeland and citizens--is not a subject for discussion in the major media.

President Bush, the supposed conservative Republican, is doing what his liberal Democrat opponents (Senators Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, Clinton, et al.) called for all along: turning Iraq over to UN administration. The failure to find the Iraqi WMDs that the administration promised were there has destroyed U.S. credibility in the eyes of our allies, as well as in the eyes of our own citizens. It will be very difficult for any future U.S. president to take unilateral action to defend genuine American security interests.

Most importantly, President Bush has firmly established a dangerous precedent that says it is U.S. policy that UN resolutions must be enforced and that "rogue" nations posing a threat to global peace and security--as defined by the UN--must be punished and disarmed. This is a mammoth step forward in UN empowerment and has conferred a new legitimacy on the world body that is wholly undeserving. The UN has been given a new stature as the only international institution that can serve as a check on irresponsible unilateral action by the U.S., the world's only superpower.

In fact, George W. Bush has done so much for the UN that his fervent supporters at National Review have nominated him to take Kofi Annan's place once George has finished his White House days. We're not kidding.

In a January 30, 2004 article entitled, "Dubya for Secretary General," National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez insists: "After he's won reelection and after he's served his second term as leader of the free world, President George W. Bush could do a world of good as United Nations secretary general. Yes, seriously." Ms. Lopez cites President Bush's leadership on human rights issues at the UN, especially his "tough stance" against sex trafficking, as cause for jubilation. She and her fellow internationalists at National Review would be ecstatic to see a former U.S. president--especially one like "Dubya," who is falsely perceived to be a conservative--at the helm of the UN. They know this would help immensely to undermine all residual opposition to full UN empowerment.

On September 14, 2001, three days after the 9-11 terror attacks, former Senator Gary Hart (CFR) made a very revealing comment at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Washington, D.C. Sen. Hart, who had co-chaired the CFR-spawned United States Commission on National Security/21st Century with former Senator Warren Rudman (CFR), told his fellow Council members: "There is a chance for the President of the United States to use this disaster to carry out what his father--a phrase his father used I think only once, and it hasn't been used since--and that is a new world order."

Mr. Hart was wrong; George Bush Sr. used the cryptic phrase "new world order" more than once. But the one Hart was probably remembering was the address to Congress by President George Bush (the elder) on September 11, 1990, regarding Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In that speech, the president (a longtime one-worlder and former CFR director) outlined his proposed war against Iraq and made the following infamous declaration: "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective--a new world order--can emerge.... We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders."

Now the son, flanked by many of the father's same CFR globalist advisers, is pushing forward that same scheme for a new world order. If allowed to be fully established, this world order, ultimately, would outlaw all sovereign nation states, including our own. Saddam's odious regime simply provided a convenient, easy target for establishing an indispensable precedent.