Public support for President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and has waned in recent months. Events on the ground are partially responsible for the decline, but the difficulties in securing Iraq are not the source of the public's increasing skepticism. The problem for the President has been the failure to find and weapons of mass destruction. The public would endure the hard-days in Iraq with much more patience if David Kay and the Iraqi Survey Group had found WMD stockpiles in the early days at the end of the war. But, to this date, no stockpiles have been found and opponents of the war are quick to point this out. The absence of WMD stockpiles, opponents argue, invalidates the primary justification for the war and, therefore, the war itself. Republicans and other supporters of the war are inexplicably willing to concede this point. Not surprisingly, polls suggest that this argument has crept into and adhered to the public consciousness. However, the justification for taking down Saddam Hussein was not that he merely possessed stockpiles of weapons. Nor was there an imminent threat that he might launch an independent attack against the United States. The real threat rested in the possibility that he could have passed weapons, or the technological know-how to create weapons, to terrorists with intent on harming the United States. The lack of stockpiles does not invalidate this pre-war threat.

The war against Iraq was legally justified merely by the fact that Saddam was in “material breach” of UN resolution 1441. For twelve years Saddam had failed to comply with requirements agreed upon as conditions of his surrender in the first Gulf war. The United States had the legal standing, therefore, to enforce those conditions without any further justification. Resolution 1441 bolstered this legal standing. However, the President was very clear in the run-up to the war that it was the potential collaboration between Saddam and terrorist groups aiming to attack the United States that was a primary justification for invading Iraq. On October 7th 2002, the President articulated this point in a speech given in Cincinnati:

“… sophisticated delivery systems aren't required for a chemical or biological attack; all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.
And that is the source of our urgent concern about Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorist groups.
…
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”

When David Kay issued his report in January 2004 stating that WMD stockpiles, in his opinion, did not exist, the anti-war contingent quickly went into attack mode. But, in their desperation to find something concrete to hang their “Bush misled us into an unjust war” hat on, they forgot to pay attention to what Kay actually said. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28th 2004, Kay was asked to assess the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United States in light of the fact that no WMD stockpiles had been found. He responded with the following:

“I have said, I actually think, this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought.
I think, when we have the complete record, you're going to discover, that after 1998, it became a regime that was totally corrupt. Individuals were out for their own protection.
And, in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood, at some point in the future, of a seller and a buyer meeting up, would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated, with what may turn out not to be a fully accurate estimate.”

Kay confirmed that Iraq did not dismantle their weapons program. In fact the program remained active and the capacity and infrastructure to produce WMD remained in place. While there were no stockpiles, new stockpiles could have been produced in short order.

Kay's report did not refute the justification for war - it strengthened it. Additionally, separate British and Senate Intelligence Committee reports have also confirmed that President Bush's claim in the 2003 State of the Union speech that Saddam attempted to buy uranium from Africa was accurate and “well-founded”. Saddam was not contained as some have suggested. His weapons programs were alive and well, as were his nuclear aspirations.

The question is not whether Iraq had the capacity to aid terrorists in acquiring WMD, they clearly did. The question that faced policy makers was; would Saddam actually do it. Would Iraq collaborate with terrorists and aid them in acquiring a weapon of mass destruction for use against the United States? Was this a feasible enough threat to require imminent action? Post 9/11 the threshold for taking military action against potential threats had been lowered significantly.

The United States could no longer allow threats to lie in wait; nor could they hope to merely contain them. Terrorist attacks were now viewed, not as police actions, but rather as acts of war. Therefore, the new strategy of the United States would be to aggressively seek out and eliminate all “gathering” threats before they materialize in our cities. In determining that Iraq constituted one of these gathering threats, the administration came to three conclusions about Saddam Hussein; one, Saddam had enough of a disregard for human life to be complicit in the murder of thousands; two, Saddam harbored anti-American sentiments strong enough to wish harm to the United States; and three, Saddam had verifiable connections to terrorist organizations along with a common sense of purpose to those groups. The intellectual justification of the war is measured by the merits of those three conclusions.

The first conclusion was evident to anyone with any knowledge of Saddam's regime. The history of Saddam's reign is littered with horror stories of mass murder and torture evidenced by the dozens of mass graves uncovered since the war ended. This is a man that had young children tortured to death in front of their parents. He also had no compunction in using WMD for mass murder. He had used WMD against the Kurds in northern Iraq and against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war.

Was Saddam anti-American? This second conclusion was easy to reach as well. The United States had humiliated Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war. His desire to create a new dominant Arabia with him as the leader was quashed. As a result of his aggression, he lived under the thumb of the UN and United States with no-fly zones enforced by U.S. and British warplanes. During the “No-Fly Zone War” in the 1990's, Saddam displayed his contempt by regularly attempting to shoot down U.S. and British planes. In a plot orchestrated by Iraqi intelligence in April of 1993, Saddam attempted to have former President Bush assassinated while he visited Kuwait City. There is no legitimate argument that can be made to suggest that Saddam didn't have an axe to grind with the United States or that he would not wish to cause us harm. Statements Saddam made following the USS Cole and 9-11 attacks make his feelings for the U.S. clear:

U.S.S. Cole Bombing, October 12, 2000
"[Iraqis] should intensify struggle and jihad in all fields and by all means..."
Iraq TV, October 22, 2000 (State-controlled)

The Attacks of September 11
"The United States reaps the thorns its rulers have planted in the world."
Saddam Hussein, September 12, 2001

"The real perpetrators [of September 11] are within the collapsed buildings."
Alif-Ba, September 11, 2002 (State-controlled newspaper)

"[September 11 was] God's punishment."
Al-Iktisadi, September 11, 2002 (State-controlled newspaper)

"The simple truth [about September 11] is that America burned itself and now tries to burn the world."
Alif-Ba, September 11, 2002 (State-controlled magazine)

"[I]t is possible to turn to biological attack, where a small can, not bigger than the size of a hand, can be used to release viruses that affect everything..."
Babil, September 20, 2001 (State-controlled newspaper)

On the third conclusion, there has been much debate regarding the nexus between Saddam Hussein and terrorists. However, some connections are not refuted. For example, Iraq offered safe haven to Abu Nidal head of the Fatah-The Revolutionary Council group. Nidal began his terrorist career with the PLO in the early 1970's but left due to that group's “moderate” policies. His group had claimed responsibility for over 20 terrorist attacks around the world killing close to 300 and wounding over 600. He was found dead in his Baghdad home in 2002.

Iraq also offered refuge for Abu Abbas who, along with three other Palestinian terrorists, was responsible for the hijacking of the Achille Lauro. The hijackers killed a 69-year-old disabled American named Leon Klinghoffer throwing his body and wheelchair overboard. In addition, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, along with almost two-dozen of his fellow al-Qaeda operatives, was in Baghdad prior to the start of the war in 2002.

Saddam offered more than just safe haven. Families of Palestinian suicide bombers were the beneficiaries of Saddam's generosity towards Islamic militants. Saddam offered rewards of $25,000 to the families of any successful Palestinian suicide bomber. It is estimated that Iraq paid out over 35 million dollars to the families of these “martyrs” of the “intifada” beginning in 2000.