The Distortions Keep on Coming

President Bush stated that “I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe, that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you, he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one point in time, which is pretty tangible evidence.”

No one, however, questions that Iraq had active biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs during the 1980s, the period when Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq. The UN Security Council demanded an end to such programs in 1991 under resolution 687 and most evidence suggests that these programs were indeed eliminated by the mid-1990s. Ironically, the United States quietly supported Saddam Hussein's regime during this earlier period when the regime actually was developing weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq after these programs were apparently no longer in existence.