Iraq invasion 'made America safer' - Bush

Invading Iraq made America safer, President George Bush said, defending his war decision in the face of a Senate report debunking White House justifications for attacking Saddam Hussein’s government.

Bush presented his case in a speech at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, yesterday, in his first public reaction to criticism by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which said last week that the administration’s belief that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons was wrong, based on false or overstated CIA analyses.

“Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,” Bush told lab employees. “We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. In the world after September 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take.”

Bush noted problems cited in the Senate report, including a shortage of human-gathered intelligence and poor co-ordination among intelligence services. But he did not comment on ideas proposed for reforming America’s intelligence network, nor did he say when he planned to name a new CIA director to replace George Tenet, who stepped down on Sunday for personal reasons.

Instead, Bush sought to compare situations in nations like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to how they were three years ago when the Taliban ruled in Kabul, Saddam was in power in Baghdad and Libya was backing terrorism and spending money to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

Under an agreement with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to dismantle his country’s nuclear weapons programme, Libya’s weapons hardware was shipped to Oak Ridge earlier this year.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry quickly dismissed Bush’s claim that Americans were safer and said that if elected, his number one security goal would be to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

“Have we taken every step we should to stop North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programmes?” Kerry asked. “Have we restructured our intelligence agencies and given them the resources they need to keep our country safe? The honest answer, in each of these areas, is that we have done too little, often too late, and even cut back our efforts. It’s not enough to give speeches.”