Rumsfeld joins Bush counter-offensive on Iraq war

By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld on Tuesday joined President George W. Bush’s
counter-offensive against Iraq war critics, retracing what
Rumsfeld called the “actual history” of U.S. involvement in
Iraq.

Bush has twice in recent days ripped into Democrats who
have accused the Republican president and other top
administration officials, including Rumsfeld and Vice President
Dick Cheney, of manipulating intelligence on weapons of mass
destruction to justify the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

No such weapons were found and the Bush administration has
been hounded by Democratic critics over its use of prewar
intelligence as public support for the war wanes amid rising
U.S. casualties.

Echoing Bush’s stance that the administration was not alone
in believing Iraq posed a threat, Rumsfeld quoted former
President Bill Clinton and senior Clinton administration
officials as warning in 1998 that then-Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein planned to use weapons of mass destruction.

In remarks prepared for delivery to a later news
conference, the defense secretary quoted Clinton as saying in
1998 in an address that “other countries possess weapons of
mass destruction and ballistic missiles.”

“With Saddam, there is one big difference: he has used them
… the international community had little doubt then, and I
have no doubt today, that left unchecked Saddam Hussein will
use these terrible weapons again,” Clinton added shortly after
he ordered limited military action against Iraq in response to
Baghdad’s decision to expel U.N. weapons inspectors.

Democrats have responded to the administration’s
counter-attack by denying they saw the same intelligence as the
administration before the war. They have accused the
administration of trying to convince the U.S. public there was
a link between Saddam and al Qaeda even though the intelligence
community rejected that idea.

GORE AND ALBRIGHT ALSO CITED

Noting Bush’s remarks last Friday that critics seemed to
want to rewrite history, Rumsfeld said it might “be useful to
take a moment to retrace the actual history.”

He noted that, in 1998, the U.S. Congress passed, and
Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act, setting U.S. policy
“to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam
Hussein from power” and promote democracy in Iraq.

Rumsfeld also quoted then-Vice President Al Gore as saying
later that year that “if you get someone like Saddam Hussein to
get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons,
biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with
such weapons?”

Then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also warned at
the time that “the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will
use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us and our
allies is the greatest security threat we face.”

Bush, who is trying to battle back from the lowest job
approval ratings of his presidency, has conceded that the
administration was wrong in its assessment of Saddam’s weapons
of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion.

But in a speech to U.S. troops in Alaska on his way to a
trip to Asia on Monday, he said, “Reasonable people can
disagree about the conduct of the war — but it is
irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them
and the American people.”