Uncategorized

[Note to Readers: This article will be updated as new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program becomes available. Last time updated: March 2004] In an effort to quell the controversy over the 16 words in U.S. President George W. Bushs State of the Union address, the White House declassified and released intelligence documents on July 18, 2003, to prove there was ample evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had a continuing and expanding nuclear weapons program. Yet those same documents indicate that some senior officials had serious doubts about the threat of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and the regimes links to al Qaeda. A look back at President Bushs October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the president made a detailed case for war against Iraq, reveals that what he said did not always reflect what U.S. intelligence analysts believed at that time and often departs significantly from what has been found on the ground in Iraq after the war.

The United States and the European Union both want peace in the Middle East—but that’s about all they agree upon. While Washington believes that regime change in Iraq will usher in an era of regional peace and stability, Brussels worries that U.S. adventurism will make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy. Will war in Iraq prove to be an act of creative destruction, or simply destruction? Two outspoken thinkers from opposite sides of the Atlantic—Richard Perle, a key national security advisor to the Pentagon, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the European Parliament’s Green Party—traded views and barbs at a recent debate in Washington, D.C., at the invitation of Helga Flores Trejo, the new Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.