‘We Were All Wrong’ on WMD -- or Were We?

Re “Iraq Weapons Data Flawed, Congress Told,” Jan. 29: David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, declared, “It turns out we were all wrong” regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. With all due respect to Kay, “we” didn’t all get it wrong. Many countries, including France, Germany, Russia and virtually all of Iraq’s neighbors, didn’t “get it wrong.” Many columnists cautioned that we were needlessly rushing to war. But the Bush administration was not interested in facts.

The administration grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq in order to take the U.S. on a dangerous, unilateral path of destruction. The people of Iraq, our brave soldiers and American taxpayers will be paying for the errors of the Bush administration for many years to come.

Robert Matano

Redlands

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I don’t understand why it is necessary to foist the blame onto the intelligence community for providing misleading information that propelled the U.S. into war to answer the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of Defense and a major framer of Bush foreign policy, said it all in a Vanity Fair interview released last May. The hawks in the Cabinet wanted war. The focus on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was simply politically convenient. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” He went on to say that having troops in Iraq was preferable to having them in Saudi Arabia.

Frances Spielberg

Pacific Palisades

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Is it possible that President Bush always knew the truth about Hussein’s WMD: that there were none, and therefore it was relatively easy for our army to invade Iraq? Or did he really plan to expose our men and women, as they invaded, to such powerful and horrifying weapons?

Janet Macaulay

Claremont

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Re “Baghdad Is Bush’s Blue Dress,” Commentary, Jan. 27: Robert Scheer argues that we should impeach Bush because in the 20/20 hindsight of one arms inspector there were no substantial weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a year ago.

On that reasoning, I guess we’d also have to get rid of all the leaders of the countries that supported the multiple U.N. resolutions to force Hussein into weapons inspections. Since the only difference between our leadership and the combined wisdom of the U.N. was our determination to enforce weapons inspections in the face of Hussein’s repeated refusals, it would only make sense that everyone must go because of this lack of WMD.

No? Guess we’d also better put Hussein and his neofascists back in power too, while we’re at it, just to make amends.

James A. Gorton

Pasadena