Let us all now praise David Kay. In Washington these days, he is, indeed, a rare bird: a man who is willing to stand up and say he was wrong.
Pat Buchanan and I met Kay in midsummer 2002, in the early days of MSNBC's "Buchanan and Press." Before the mainstream media paid any notice, and long before the White House started beating the war drums, we focused on Iraq, Saddam Hussein and the possibility of war over biological and chemical weapons.
David Kay became our favorite guest. He was former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. He knew the territory. He knew the players. He knew the technology. Despite our skepticism, he insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
After the war, Pat and I enjoyed a good laugh when our good friend was given the job of leading the search for Saddam's illicit weapons. If anybody could find them, David Kay would, we agreed.
He didn't. For 10 months, Kay led the Iraq Survey Group, looking for WMDs. He came up empty-handed. This week he told the world he was wrong. There were no biological weapons, no chemical weapons, no nuclear weapons and no connection with terrorists. Reports that Iraq was prepared to use chemical weapons against our troops were false. Kay also said he found no evidence that Iraq had moved any weapons to Syria.
"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," admits Dr. Kay. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."
Ironically, documents discovered by Kay's team indicate that Iraq destroyed its stockpile of weapons in the early 1990s because they were afraid of U.N., or UNSCOM, inspectors. "The Iraqis say that they believed that UNSCOM was more effective, and they didn't want to get caught," Kay reports.
As for the $64,000 question – if Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs, why didn't he just admit it and save his country? – Kay concluded that the Iraqi leader was just bluffing in order to boost his prestige in the Arab world, frighten his rivals and deter a possible U.S. invasion.
So there you have it. From President Bush's man in charge of finding weapons of mass destruction: There weren't any. The entire given basis for the war in Iraq was phony.
What's the White House response? Total denial. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says: Just give us more time and we'll find them. And Vice President Dick Cheney, as divorced from reality as Saddam Hussein ever was, cited discovery of two semi-trailers in Iraq as "conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction."
Here's David Kay on that canard: "When you look at those two trailers, while they had capabilities in many areas, their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons." Dick Cheney, are you listening? Do you care about the truth?
David Kay urged Congress to launch an independent investigation into the faulty intelligence on Iraq. He's right. How could the same CIA that failed to connect the dots before Sept. 11 also be so wrong about Iraq's military might? We pay $30 billion a year for that outfit – for what?
But investigating the CIA is not enough. There should also be an independent investigation of the White House, starting with President Bush. It's too late for him to change his story and say we really went to war to get rid of a bad guy. That's not what he said at the time. He preached that we had to go to war to disarm Saddam Hussein and eliminate a serious threat to the United States.
How could he be so wrong? Was he duped by CIA Director George Tenet? Or, as I believe, did he and Cheney tweak the little evidence they had to make the case for a war they had already decided to wage for political purposes? Did he deliberately mislead the nation? After David Kay's testimony, is there any doubt?
Of course, if Congress won't launch such an investigation, we the people will have our own chance, on Nov. 2. After all, if lying about sex is grounds for impeachment, then certainly lying about going to war is grounds for no re-election.
Please repeat after me: President John F. Kerry.