Architect returns to repair Bush image

[TriWooOx]

Quote:A former US presidential aide defends the decision to invade Iraq, saying that George W. Bush was justified in taking the oil-rich country.

In a Tuesday debate in New York on the Bush legacy, Karl Rove said the September 11 attacks on America had a major impact on how Bush dealt with the then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

"In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses," he said, justifying the Bush decision to wage war on Iraq over the then Washington belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s," continued the architect of the Bush presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004.

The contentions are in stark contrast with those expressed in 2003 by former US ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who said the Bush administration engineered intelligence about Saddam to justify an invasion of the oil-rich country.

The CIA had tasked Wilson with investigating the suspected sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by the African country of Niger to Iraq in the late 1990s.

During the official investigations, Wilson informed the CIA that it was highly unlikely that any such transaction had ever taken place.

The British government later published a "white paper", claiming that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an "immediate" danger. As for evidence, the report cited Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January 2003, President Bush pointed to the British dossier and repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

Still prior to the US invasion of Iraq, informed figures such as Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, publicly argued that the Middle Eastern country did not possess the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) the Bush White House claimed.

In March 2003, Ritter publicly argued that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).


In 2007, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan went against the Bush administration and declared that the prime motive for the war on Iraq was oil. He said that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," he said.

"If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands," Greenspan said, "our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war."

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