By Stewart Powell and Dan Freedman in Washington
September 17, 2003
The United States Vice-President's retreat from prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons appears to be part of a broader Bush Administration effort to abandon disputed assertions without admitting mistakes, experts say.
In an interview on Sunday, Dick Cheney rolled back his prewar claim that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.
Two days earlier, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, had said he was mistaken when he claimed that "a great many" high-ranking lieutenants of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, were plotting with remnants of Saddam's regime to kill Americans in Iraq.
Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who has worked for four presidents, said the Administration's goal "is not to admit mistakes".
"Their actions remind me of the old adage that being president is never having to say you're sorry," Mr Hess said.
Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who studies political damage control, said the Administration was "very gradually trying to rub the rough edges off earlier claims and predictions".
"Administration officials are eating crow one by one, eating smaller portions and calling it prime beef," Mr Sabato said.
Mr Cheney conceded in a TV interview that he had mistakenly claimed three days before the March 19 invasion of Iraq that Saddam had "reconstituted nuclear weapons".
"I misspoke," Mr Cheney said. " We never had evidence that [Saddam] had acquired a nuclear weapon." He also retreated from his allegation that the September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had ties with Iraqi intelligence.
"We have never been able to develop any more of that yet, either in terms of confirming it or denying it," Mr Cheney said.
He also dropped his prewar certainty that unfettered inspections would uncover Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "We think that the jury is still out in terms of trying to get everything pulled together with respect to what we know," Mr Cheney said.
He believed evidence would emerge to show at least that Saddam "had aspirations to acquire a nuclear weapon".
On Friday, Mr Wolfowitz narrowed his earlier claim that "a great many of bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organise in co-operation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime to attack in Iraq".
Mr Wolfowitz said he had misspoken. "It's not 'a great many' - it's one," he said.
He said he had been referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda operative training Iraqis in the use of chemical weapons.
The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, offered his own roll-back last Wednesday when he was asked to clarify his March 30 claim on weapons of mass destruction that "we know where they are".
Mr Rumsfeld said: "Sometimes I overstate for emphasis. I should have said, 'I believe we're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area, and that was our best judgement.' "
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