US: Almost two years after President Bush ordered the US to invade Iraq on the grounds that it was threatening Americans with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the White House has conceded for the first time that Saddam Hussein had no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
The White House press secretary, Mr Scott McClellan, said yesterday there no longer was an active search for weapons and the administration did not hold out hopes that any weapons would be found. "There may be a couple, a few people, that are focused on that" but it has largely concluded, he said.
The Iraqi Survey Group comprising 1,200 military and intelligence specialists, instructed to search for weapons, was wound up shortly before Christmas. The war has so far cost the lives of 1,353 American personal - almost half of the number killed in the September 11th attacks - and tens of thousands of Iraqis.
The report contradicted one of Mr Bush's chief reasons for the war that led to the toppling of Saddam in April 2003 and ushered in the current era of chaos.
Before the invasion, Mr Bush and other top US officials claimed Iraq was refusing to get rid of its unconventional weapons and had reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme. They also maintained that Saddam had links to al-Qaeda and could pass on Iraq's WMD for terrorist actions. All the pre-war assertions have now been discounted after a search costing hundreds of millions of dollars (the details are classified).
Mr Charles Duelfer, head of the survey group, has returned to the United States and will not be replaced. His interim report in October that no WMD had been manufactured since 1991 will stand as the final report. An intelligence official told the Washington Post there was only a small possibility that weapons were smuggled out of Iraq.
The House Democratic leader, Ms Nancy Pelosi, called on Mr Bush to explain to Americans "why he was so wrong for so long" about the reasons for a war that cost thousands of lives when there was no imminent threat to the US.
The Interim Iraqi Prime Minister, Mr Iyad Allawi, acknowledged on Tuesday that parts of Iraq would not be safe enough for voting on January 30th but he and Mr Bush vowed in a telephone call to press ahead with the elections, Mr McClellan said.
However, the New York Times in a lengthy editorial yesterday said it was time to talk about postponing the election because of the danger of igniting a civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
The coming elections "long touted as the beginning of a new, democratic Iraq are looking more and more like the beginning of that worst-case scenario".
The decisions by US-led forces in Iraq to disband Saddam Hussein's army and bar senior Baathists from government jobs after "we liberated Iraq" were the "right decisions," Mr Paul Bremer, former US administrator in Iraq, wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
"They served an important strategic purpose and recognized realities on the ground after the war," Mr Bremer wrote. He said the coalition's objectives in Iraq went beyond "regime change" and President Bush made clear the US was going to help Iraqis create "a New Iraq".