“Senior American officials concluded at the beginning of last May that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, The Observer has learnt.

Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors familiar with the details of the hunt for WMD told The Observer it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling, despite the assertions of senior Bush administration figures and the Prime Minister, Tony Blair.”

What this news signifies, among other things, is that every U.S. service member killed or wounded in pursuit of Iraqi WMD after May 2004 was an unnecessary casualty directly caused by administration intransigence.

Feb. 2, 2004 – Bowing to pressure, the White House agrees to an investigation into why intelligence about Iraq WMD proved so flawed. President Bush announces that he will appoint a presidential commission to review the intelligence.

Feb. 2, 2004 – Dr. A. Q. Khan, known as the godfather of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, is arrested and confesses to sharing nuclear secrets with North Korea, Iran and Libya for a decade.

Same day – The New York Times reports that the first official U.S. Army history of the Iraq war reveals that U.S. forces in Iraq have been plagued with “a morass” of logistics problems from the first.

Feb. 1, 2, 3, 2004 – White House office emails for these days are missing, according to subsequent investigation by the House Government Reform Committee chaired by Henry Waxman of California.

Feb. 6, 2004 – The President signs Executive Order 13328, establishing the WMD Commission. The Commission is charged with assessing whether the Intelligence Community is sufficiently authorized, organized, equipped, trained, and resourced to identify and warn in a timely manner of, and to support United States Government efforts to respond to, the development and transfer of knowledge, expertise, technologies, materials, and resources associated with the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, related means of delivery, and other related threats of the 21st Century and their employment by foreign powers (including terrorists, terrorist organizations, and private networks).

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/wmdcomm.html

This signing, unquestionably under the political duress of the 2004 election year, is another small step in the series of investigations and research studies belatedly reconstructing the process of ‘what went wrong’ in the lead-up to war.

The WMD Commission also studies how the Intelligence Community functioned in regard to purported Iraq weapons of mass destruction, issuing its final report in March 2005, see later.

Feb. 6, 7, 8, 9, 2004 – White House office emails for these days are missing, according to subsequent investigation.

Feb. 11, 2004 – A former oil minister in Iraq, Issam al-Chalabi, speaking at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates conference in Houston, says the U.S. failed to draw up “a well-defined oil policy” before the invasion. He says that the occupying forces have not protected the oilfields, allowing looting and sabotage to continue unchecked, especially in northern Iraq. He also questions why Iraq is being forced to import oil, when its refining capacity of 700,000 barrels per day is more than twice its needs.

Feb. 12, 2004 – Iraq’s Governing Council names 80 Iraqis as ministry undersecretaries. However, within hours, Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) suspends the Iraqi appointments, allegedly because they were made on sectarian and party basis. Also, about six of the 80 are relatives of members of Iraq’s Governing Council.

Presumably the administration objects to this kind of thing in Iraq more than it objects to it at home, where Liz Cheney in 2004 serves in the State Department, Colin Powell’s son at the Federal Communications Commission, Cheney’s son-in-law at OMB, etc. Furthermore, Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraq Governing Council does succeed in placing relatives and friends of his in the Defense Ministry, the Commerce Ministry, the Central Bank and elsewhere, apparently without obstruction by U.S. authorities, although Bremer reportedly loses confidence in the rightness of Chalabi’s advice to disband the Iraq army and to ‘de-Baathify’ all ranks of Iraqi civil governance.