Behind Bush’s WMD Diffidence

The Bush administration’s half-heartedness in disclosing that coalition forces have discovered about 500 shells containing chemical weapons since 2003 -- mostly sarin nerve gas and mustard gas – is perplexing, to say the least.
After all, this White House has been pummeled mercilessly for its apparent failure to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, one of the key reasons the US invaded Iraq and overthrew the Baathist regime.
The president and his advisers have been called liars when the Clinton administration and the intelligence agencies of France, Russia and other nations had concluded that Saddam’s chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapon capabilities posed a serious threat to international peace and stability.
Political opponents of the president and the press – dominated by Bush critics – have either rubbished the latest reports or simply ignored them. It becomes easier to flout the journalistic tenets of accuracy and fairness when the president’s approval ratings dip below 40 percent.
Yet there could have been genuine reasons for the White House’s timidity. If the United States had promptly announced the WMD discoveries, wouldn’t that have been tantamount to leading terrorists, including those from al-Qaeda, to the stockpiles?
This undoubtedly would have placed coalition troops at risk. Forced to choose between a marginal advantage in public relations and exposing troops to further harm, the White House reassuringly opted for the latter.
Speaking of al-Qaeda, a chemical attack would have been a monumental propaganda coup, enhancing recruitment and financial support. For Americans, morale in Iraq and on the home front would have plummeted.
Another reason for the White House diffidence might have been the urgency of protecting informants. The decline in human intelligence has been blamed for most of the bungling of the past decade. The US intelligence community is clearly on a campaign to strengthen its ability to get real information from real people on the ground.
Unprotected informants serve to silence ones still at work and dissuades many from offering their services. Here, too, the wider imperative of boosting America’s human-intelligence capabilities may have taken precedence over some media mileage.
One thing that persuaded the White House to go low key must have been its conviction that nothing would have changed the minds of its opponents in the political arena and the press.