Officials Say Iraq War Worthwhile

Officials Say Iraq War Worthwhile
Associated Press
March 15, 2004

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials continue to hold out hope that weapons of mass destruction stockpiles will be found in Iraq. But even if they're not, they say, the war to topple Saddam Hussein was still worthwhile.

The Iraqi leader, now in U.S. custody, represented "the most dangerous regime in the world's most dangerous region," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

With Friday marking the one-year anniversary of the start of the war, the administration is aggressively defending its handling of the war. It blanketed the Sunday network news shows with its top military and diplomatic officials, who stressed the danger posed by Saddam and highlighted progress in rebuilding Iraq.

The war has become a top issue in the presidential campaign. Democrats say President Bush's poor planning and failure to build a broader international coalition have left the United States mired in a conflict with an extraordinary cost in lives and tax dollars.

Bush built the case for war around intelligence that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an advanced nuclear weapons program. But U.S. inspectors have found no stockpiles and say the nuclear threat was overstated.

The CIA's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, has urged Bush to admit that the intelligence was wrong. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declined to concede the point Sunday, saying 1,200 inspectors are continuing to look for easily concealed weapons in a country the size of California.

"I think it's perfectly proper to reserve final judgment until we've been able to go through that process, run down those leads and see what actually took place," Rumsfeld said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Saddam never lost his intention to have weapons of mass destruction and he had the capability and infrastructure to build them.

Powell had laid out the administration's case against Saddam in a speech before the United Nations one month before the war. Asked on "Fox News Sunday" if he felt responsible for giving bad information, Powell said: "I wasn't giving the world bad information. I was giving the world the information that we had at the time we had it."

Powell rejected suggestions by some Democrats that the administration intentionally provided misleading information.

"We may not find the stockpiles. They may not exist any longer. But let's not suggest that somehow we knew this" before the war, he told ABC's "This Week." "We went to the United Nations, we went to the world with the best information we had. Nothing that was cooked."

Powell said the failure to find weapons doesn't take "away from the merit of the case" for war.

"I don't think this takes away from the rightness of this, to remove this dictator, make sure that there would be no weapons of mass destruction in the future," he said.

Asked on CNN's "Late Edition" if the war in Iraq was worthwhile given that 564 U.S. soldiers have died there, Rumsfeld said, "Oh, my goodness, yes. There's just no question ... 25 million people in Iraq are free."