Failed Arms Search Called Blow to Strike-First Policy

The failure to find the weapons of mass destruction that President Bush cited as a prime reason for launching last year’s invasion of Iraq undercuts the president’s strike-first policy in the war on terrorism, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector said Sunday.

“If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and others abroad, you certainly can’t have a policy of preemption,” said David Kay, who led the administration’s so-far fruitless search for unconventional weapons in Iraq.

“Pristine intelligence -- good, accurate intelligence -- is a fundamental bench stone of any sort of policy of preemption to be even thought about,” Kay said on “Fox News Sunday.”

He was referring to the president’s preemption doctrine announced two years ago in a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. Bush said then that the United States could no longer seek simply to deter or “contain” nations that might pose a threat, but rather must strike them first.

“Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies,” Bush told the graduating cadets. “We must take the battle to the enemy.... In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.”

By then, U.S. forces had helped drive out the Taliban regime in Afghanistan -- and Iraq became the first significant test of the new preventive war policy.

One year ago this week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell went to the United Nations in New York to present the administration’s case for invading Iraq. He showed aerial photos of supposed weapons factories and presented intercepted messages that suggested the Iraqis were ready to use chemical and biological weapons. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Powell said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Hussein had “amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax, botulism toxin and possibly smallpox.”

Bush said in a speech that “Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program,” and in a television interview on the eve of the war, Vice President Dick Cheney went a step further: “We believe he [Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

None of these statements proved to be accurate, Kay said after returning from Iraq. “It turns out we were all wrong,” he told a Senate panel last week.

Kay refused to say whether the blame lies with a failure to get good information from Iraq, a flawed system of analysis at the CIA or a misuse of the data by a White House that was bent on war.

“When you make mistakes,” Kay said on Fox, “you need to be seen as understanding why you made those mistakes, so the next security crisis, whether it be Syria or Iran or wherever, and we tell our allies, ‘This is why we think it’s dangerous,’ they understand that we’ve taken steps to be sure that we’re correct and that, in fact, we’re honest about what we’re talking about.”