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Then, in November 2001, as alliance soldiers combed through al-Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan, documents and computer records revealed that Osama bin Laden's network had been trying to acquire WMDs. Administration officials didn't have to work hard to identify a possible supplier. "Iraq," says a White House official, "was the easiest place they could get them from." Says a former senior Administration official: "The eureka moment was that realization by the President that were a WMD to fall into [terrorists'] hands, their willingness to use it would be unquestioned. So we must act pre-emptively to ensure...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: First Stop, Iraq | 3/31/2003 | See Source »

...Saddam's cruelty, says a source close to the White House, was neither ghoulish nor an expression of Bush's propensity to identify evil in the world. The point, says this adviser, is that Bush thinks Saddam is insane. "If there is one thing standing between those who want WMDs and those who have them," says this source, "it is this madman. Depending on the sanity of Saddam is not an option...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: First Stop, Iraq | 3/31/2003 | See Source »

...this point, Bush was on board for action against Iraq. But in what form? It was easy to say Iraq should be disarmed and Saddam unseated from power if he would not abandon his WMDs. But by the spring of 2002, the Administration had no idea how to achieve such a goal. Would the U.S. do it alone? What would Washington tell its allies in the Middle East and Europe? In March, as he did 12 years earlier, Cheney set out on a trip to the Middle East to rally support for an aggressive American policy against Iraq. The trip...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: First Stop, Iraq | 3/31/2003 | See Source »

Then Cheney, probably the most influential Vice President in U.S. history, began to pay attention. His interest grew out of the Bush Administration's obsession with building a system to defend the U.S. against missile attacks. For the neoconservatives, missile defense and Iraq's possession of WMDs were both examples of a common concern, "asymmetric threats," or the idea that nations with far less conventional military strength than the U.S. would use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons to redress the balance. Cheney had been charged with developing a policy on homeland security in response to asymmetric threats, which meant that...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: First Stop, Iraq | 3/31/2003 | See Source »

...weekend after Sept. 11, Bush convened his national-security team at Camp David. Wolfowitz argued that if military action was to be taken against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which was harboring the leadership of al-Qaeda, it should also be taken against Iraq. Saddam's regime had WMDs, had shown that it was willing to use them, and harbored a continuing hostility to the U.S. Powell was opposed to anything so ambitious, however, and Cheney didn't back up his old Pentagon colleague. Rice says the Vice President was a "proponent of doing one thing at a time--Afghanistan...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: First Stop, Iraq | 3/31/2003 | See Source »

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