July 30, 2003: Rice Says Iraq Was Trying to Reconstitute Nuclear Weapons Program, Possessed Other WMD before Invasion

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asserts that the intelligence community is convinced Saddam Hussein had been trying to reconstitute a nuclear weapon’s program. “Going into the war against Iraq, we had very strong intelligence,” Rice says. “I’ve been in this business for 20 years. And some of the strongest intelligence cases that I’ve seen, key judgments by our intelligence community that Saddam Hussein could have a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade, if left unchecked… that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program.” Answering questions as to why no evidence of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons has yet been found, Rice says: “What we knew going into the war was that this man was a threat. He had weapons of mass destruction. He had used them before. He was continuing to try to improve his weapons programs. He was sitting astride one of the most volatile regions in the world, a region out of which the ideologies of hatred had come that led people to slam airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington. Something had to be done about that threat and the president to simply allow this brutal dictator, with dangerous weapons, to continue to destabilize the Middle East.” [ZDF German Television, 7/31/2003; Talon News, 8/1/2003; US House Committee on Government Reform, 3/16/2004; Center for Public Integrity, 1/23/2008] The day before, UN weapons inspector David Kay reported that no evidence of Iraqi WMD had been unearthed (see July 29, 2003). Rice was at that briefing.