In his book State of Denial, Bob Woodward wrote that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney blamed Saddam Hussein four days after the September 11, 2001 attacks and called for a military strike on Iraq, whereas President George W. Bush was preparing for a military strike on Afghanistan in retaliation for the terrorist attacks.
In his annual State of the Union speech in January 2003, Bush announced that the Saddam regime had tried to buy uranium from Niger to use in a program to manufacture nuclear weapons.
In February 2003, then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell displayed pictures at a United Nations Security Council session purportedly showing that Iraq had built mobile laboratories for the production of weapons of mass destruction.
He also played recorded telephone conversations of Iraqi government officials in which they were allegedly talking about Iraq’s weapons program in Arabic.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced in early 2003 that he had obtained intelligence that proved the Iraqi army had developed the capability to load and fire missiles carrying WMDs within 45 minutes.
The doctrine of preemptive war began to take shape with these accusations.
U.S. officials said the enemy was on the verge of obtaining the capability to attack U.S. national interests, so they had to strike before being attacked to eliminate the threat.
The invasion began on March 20, 2003. Over 150,000 U.S. soldiers entered Iraq to find WMDs and eliminate them. What happened after almost four years of occupation?
Former chief U.S. arms inspector David Kay announced that there was no evidence of weapons or WMD proliferation after several months of searching Iraq inch by inch.
Former U.S. ambassador to Niger Joseph C. Wilson unequivocally rejected the allegations that Niamey had tried to sell uranium to Baghdad.
The Pentagon also declared that all the evidence linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam’s Baathist regime was baseless. Research in Britain demonstrated that the contention that Iraq could fire missiles armed with WMDs in 45 minutes was based on unreliable evidence.
Thus, all the reasons given by the United States and Britain for the attack on Iraq turned out to be lies.
Taking all this into consideration, how can the allegation that Iran has transferred weapons to Iraqi Shia radicals for attacks on U.S. soldiers be reliable and based on accurate intelligence?
One should not be surprised if all the evidence about the transfer of Iranian weapons to Iraq is proven to be false after any possible confrontation between Iran and the United States.
