Rationale for the Iraq War
The resolution strengthened the mandate of the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), giving them the authority to go anywhere, at any time, and talk to anyone in order to verify Iraq's disarmament.
"[25] Over the next year, the Bush administration began pushing for international support for an invasion of Iraq, a campaign that culminated in Secretary of State Colin Powell's 5 February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council.
[32][33][34] The study concluded that such statements were issued by the American government as part of an "orchestrated campaign" to generate jingoistic attitudes in the United States in order to initiate a war based on "false pretenses".
[42] In his 2003 State of the Union address delivered on 28 January 2003, George W. Bush insinuated about hypothetical scenarios wherein Ba'athist Iraq was plotting to perpetrate mass-casualty attacks using chemical weapons: "Before September the 11, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained.
Secretary of State Powell said in his 5 February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council: "the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction".
On September 7, 1998, Ritter testified before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee,[59] and John McCain (R, AZ) asked him whether UNSCOM had intelligence suggesting that Iraq had assembled the components for three nuclear weapons and all that it lacked was the fissile material.
[citation needed] In an interim report on 3 October 2003, Kay reported that the group had "not yet found stocks of weapons", but had discovered "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" including clandestine laboratories "suitable for continuing CBW [chemical and biological warfare] research", a prison laboratory complex "possibly used in human testing of BW agents", a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B bacteria kept in one scientist's home, small parts and twelve-year-old documents "that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment", partially-declared UAVs and undeclared fuel for Scud missiles with ranges beyond the 150 km UN limits, "[p]lans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km", attempts to acquire long-range missile technology from North Korea, and document destruction in headquarters buildings in Baghdad.
A March 2005 addendum to the report stated that "based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of weapons of mass destruction material from Iraq to Syria took place.
Transcripts from high level meetings within Saddam Hussein's government before the invasion are consistent with the ISG conclusion that he destroyed his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction but maintained the expertise to restart production.
][75] In July 2004, Polish troops discovered insurgents trying to purchase cyclosarin, an extremely toxic substance which is an organophosphate nerve agent like its predecessor, sarin, in gas warheads produced during the Iran–Iraq War.
The material plagiarized from Marashi's work and copied nearly verbatim into the "Dodgy Dossier" was six paragraphs from his article Iraq's Security & Intelligence Network: A Guide & Analysis,[79] which was published in the September 2002 issue[80] of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (or MERIA).
[citation needed] Critics such as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean charged that the Bush and Blair administrations deliberately falsified evidence to build a case for war.
For example, Vice President Dick Cheney's September 2002 statement on Meet the Press that "we do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon", was inconsistent with the views of the intelligence community at the time.
"[103]On February 11, 2003, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress that "seven countries designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea – remain active in the US and continue to support terrorist groups that have targeted Americans".
[117] More broadly, the CIA's Kerr Group summarized in 2004 that despite "a 'purposely aggressive approach' in conducting exhaustive and repetitive searches for such links ... [the US] Intelligence Community remained firm in its assessment that no operational or collaborative relationship existed".
"[121] Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes: "The most knowledgeable analysts and investigators at the CIA and at the FBI believe that their work conclusively disproves Mylroie's claims.
London's conservative International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded in 2004 that the occupation of Iraq had become "a potent global recruitment pretext" for jihadists and that the invasion "galvanized" al-Qaeda and "perversely inspired insurgent violence" there.
As evidence supporting US and British claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destructions weakened, the Bush administration began to focus more upon the other issues that Congress had articulated within the Iraq Resolution, such as human rights violations of the Saddam Hussein government as justification for military intervention.
[137][138][139][140] Many critics have argued, despite its repeated mention in the Joint Resolution, that human rights was never a principal justification for the war, and that it became prominent only after evidence concerning weapons of mass destructions and Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism became discredited.
[142] More broadly, war critics have argued that the US and Europe supported the Saddam Hussein regime during the 1980s, a period of some of his worst human rights abuses, thus casting doubt on the sincerity of claims that military intervention was for humanitarian purposes.
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and even before the War on Terror, the administration had prompted anxiety over whether the private sector ties of cabinet members (including National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, former director of Chevron, and Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, former head of Tom Brown Inc.) would affect their judgment on energy policy.
The report recommended a comprehensive review of US military, energy, economic, and political policy toward Iraq "with the aim to lowering anti-Americanism in the Middle East and elsewhere, and set the groundwork to eventually ease Iraqi oil-field investment restrictions".
"[166] Post-Iraq invasion opinion polls conducted in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey showed that the majority of each country's population tended to "doubt the sincerity of the War on Terrorism", which they characterized instead as "an effort to control Middle East oil and to dominate the world"[according to whom?].
[167] Although there has been disagreement about where the alleged will to control and dominate originates, skeptics of the War on Terror have pointed early[168] and often[169] to the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think tank established in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.
[175]The term petrodollar warfare refers to the idea that the international use of the United States dollar as the standard means of settling oil transactions is a kind of economic imperialism enforced by violent military interventions against countries like Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela, and is a key driver of world politics.
[177][178] The New York Times reported that in February 2003, Saddam Hussein had offered, through a clandestine backchannel, to give the United States first priority as it related to Iraq oil rights, as part of a deal to avert an impending invasion.
[186] Political scientist John S. Duffield wrote in 2012 that "no compelling evidence, either in the form of declassified documents or participants' memoirs, has yet emerged indicating that oil was a prominent factor or constant consideration in the thinking of decision makers within the Bush administration".
As Vice President Cheney argued in an August 2002 speech to the annual Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, "When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace.
"[196][citation needed] David Harrison claimed in the Telegraph to have found secret documents that purported to show Russian President Vladimir Putin offering the use of assassins to Saddam's Iraqi regime to kill Western targets on November 27, 2000.
"[220]In the March 2005 Addendum to the Report, the Special Advisor furthermore went on to state that "ISG assesses that Iraq and Coalition Forces will continue to discover small numbers of degraded chemical weapons, which the former Regime mislaid or improperly destroyed prior to 1991.
