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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Monday, January 12, 2004

EDITORIAL
Justification for war lacking, says report

A new study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which finds little justification for the Bush administration's decision to wage pre-emptive war in Iraq, is not news.

The evidence has been there for months that Iraq didn't present an immediate threat to the United States, that there was no alarming link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, and that the Bush administration, as the Carnegie report puts it, "systematically" misrepresented these threats.

But it's comforting that this careful and thoughtful 61-page report so strongly validates the views, formed as they were in the heat of daily deadline pressure, that were seen on these pages in the days leading up to the war. We hasten to add that this newspaper was no more critical of the White House on this issue than many other American newspapers.

The study also found our intelligence assessment process wasn't working, while the U.N. inspection process was already accomplishing most of the goals the president went to war for.

What became clear in preparing the Carnegie study, said one of its authors, "is that this war wasn't necessary."

The extent of Iraq's nuclear and chemical weapons programs was "largely knowable," the study said, before the war. Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and there "was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution." U.N. inspectors discovered as early as 1991 that Iraqi nerve agents had lost "most of their lethality." Operations Desert Storm in 1991 and Desert Fox in 1998, coupled with U.N. inspections and sanctions, "effectively destroyed" Iraq's capabilities to produce these weapons on a mass scale.

One more indication that the weapons of mass destruction aren't there: The 400 Americans experts assigned to search for them, The New York Times reported last week, have quietly been sent home.