In the State of the Union Address earlier this year, President George W. Bush stated, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.”
This was a call to arms for the American public, stating that Iraq is a direct threat to our well-being and safety. If we didn’t force him to disarm, it could result in a nuclear attack on American soil. Pretty scary stuff, huh?
We now know through public admission from the White House in July that the information given to us in Bush’s address was not true. The allegations were based on unsubstantiated evidence and had no basis in reality.
While I don’t trust our president, I did believe that Saddam Hussein would at least have some anthrax or nerve gas lying around. After all, our government has known for two decades that Saddam has used chemical and biological weapons against Iranians and on his own people during the 1980s.
Our relationship with Saddam began in 1983 when the present Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, actually went to Iraq to meet Saddam in person. After that conference, the Reagan administration helped to fund Saddam’s efforts in the Iran-Iraq war. Satellite images and documents suggest that we even exported bacteria cultures to Iraq.
But, now there are people who say, “Does it really matter if we found the WMDs?”
We, the American public, have been told since last year that the Iraqi government was an imminent threat to our security, that they were seeking WMDs with which to attack us. We went to war based on false information which our intelligence sources knew was shoddy at best, and now we are committed to major involvement in Iraq for at least the next three to five years.
Many of those who believe that the recovery of WMDs are irrelevant argue that Saddam Hussein was a merciless tyrant that massacred his own people and deserved to be overthrown. However, our justification for going to war was to eliminate him as a threat to our country, the liberation of Iraq was not our primary objective.
It is imperative that the WMDs in Iraq are found in order to save what’s left of America’s reputation in foreign policy and also to justify an ongoing war in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians have already died. The only alternative is to face the consequences for picking a fight with a country that was not a legitimate threat to us.

Author