Basic Cause of Attack on Iraq

The issue of Iraq’s disarmament reached a crisis in 2002-2003, when President of the United States George W. Bush demanded a complete end to alleged Iraqi production and use of weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq comply with UN Resolutions requiring UN inspectors unfettered access to areas those inspectors thought might have weapons, production facilities. Iraq had been banned by the United Nations from developing or possessing such weapons since the 1991 Gulf War. It was also required to permit inspections to confirm Iraqi compliance. Bush repeatedly backed demands for unfettered inspection and disarmament with threats of invasion. In accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1284 (enacted 17 December 1999), Iraq reluctantly agreed to new inspections in late 2002. The inspectors didn’t find any WMD stockpiles, but they did not view Iraqi declarations as credible either.

In the initial stages of the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency, under George Tenet, was rising to prominence as the lead agency in the Afghanistan war. But when Tenet insisted in his personal meetings with President Bush that there was no connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq VP Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld initated a secret program to re-examine the evidence and marginalize the CIA and Tenet. The questionable intelligence acquired by this secret program was “stovepiped” to the Vice President and presented to the public. In some cases, Cheney’s office would leak the intelligence to reporters, where it would be reported by outlets such as The New York Times.