Bulletin: No W.M.D. Found

The world little noted, but at some point late last year the American search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq ended.

We will, however, long remember the doomsday warnings from the Bush administration about mushroom clouds and sinister aluminum tubes; the breathless reports from TV correspondents when the invasion began, speculating on when the "smoking gun" would be unearthed; our own failures to deconstruct all the spin and faulty intelligence.

The search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may have been one of the greatest nonevents of the early 21st century, right up there with the failure of the world's computers to crash at the end of the last millennium. That Y2K scare at least brought us an updated Internet. Fear of the nonexistent W.M.D. brought us a war.

Even after most of the sites were searched, the places that had been identified in spy photos as sinister weapons-production sites had been shown to be chicken coops, and the scary reports about nuclear weapons ready to be detonated proved to be the fantasies of feckless intelligence analysts, die-hard supporters of the invasion insisted that something would turn up. This proves once again the difficulties of debunking hard-held convictions: Mr. Bush did such a good job selling the weapons-hunting nostrum that 40 percent of Americans recently said the weapons were there.

The fact that nothing was found does not absolutely, positively prove that there wasn't something there once, something that was disassembled and trucked over the border to Syria or buried in yet another Iraqi rose garden. But it's not the sort of possibility you'd want to fight a war over. What all our loss and pain and expense in the Iraqi invasion has actually proved is that the weapons inspections worked, that international sanctions - deeply, deeply messy as they turned out to be - worked, and that in the case of Saddam Hussein, the United Nations worked. Whatever the Hussein regime once had is gone because the international community insisted. It was all destroyed a decade ago, under world pressure.

This is not a lesson that many people in power in Washington are prepared to carry away, but it is what the national adventure in the reckless doctrine of preventive warfare has to teach us.

The findings issued last fall by the Iraq Survey Group, which concluded that the W.M.D. threat did not exist in Iraq when Mr. Bush decided to go to war, will apparently stand as its final conclusions. The Washington Post reported that the leader of the search team, Charles Duelfer, is working on some additions that will be included when the report is published in book form, but quoted an intelligence official as saying there was "no particular news" in the extra material. The 1,200 military men and women who were assigned to his search team are now fighting Iraqi insurgents. We hope they succeed. If they do not, large swaths of Iraq could become a no man's land, where terrorists will be free to work on W.M.D. projects and United Nations weapons inspectors cannot go to thwart them.

NY Times
Published: January 13, 2005