Iraq's December 7, 2002 declaration: 12,000 pages that said there were no WMD programs

A story is gaining popularity that Saddam Hussein shares the blame with the United States for the US 2003 invasion because he did not clearly say that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It is the type of story Americans and other Westerners like to believe but it is completely untrue.

As a result of the U.S. and British campaign, and after prolonged negotiations between the United States, Britain, France, Russia and other U.N. Security Council members, the United Nations declared that Iraq would have to accept even more intrusive inspections than under the previous inspection regime - to be carried out by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - or face "serious consequences." Iraq agreed to accept the U.N. decision and inspections resumed in late November 2002. On December 7, 2002, Iraq submitted its 12,000 page declaration, which claimed that it had no current WMD programs. Intelligence analysts from the United States and other nations immediately began to scrutinize the document, and senior U.S. officials quickly rejected the claims.

Iraq was completely clear that it had no weapons of mass destruction. The US classified the report and did not allow access to it for non-permanent members of the UN Security Council nor the public.

Then the US fairly transparently resumed lying. This time adding that the report's statements were false. At no point, before the war or to this day, did the US ever point to a specific statement it claimed was false. We know now that the claim that Iraq made in those 12,000 pages that it had no weapons of mass destruction was true.

Iraq was not ambiguous about its lack of WMD. It did not make any effort to create doubts in anyone's mind. What happened in 2002 and 2003 was that the US created a false pretext to invade a country that it considered a threat to Israel and to the string of dictatorships the US maintains on Israel's behalf.

The lying was all on the US' side.

Years later, Condoleeza Rice told Tzipi Livni that the occupation was protecting Israel.

Discussing the needs of Israel regarding Palestinian security forces in a future-Palestinian state, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni expressed concern over a third-party military force protecting a Palestinian state's external borders. Secretary Rice inserted, "At this time there is no threat from the east because our forces are in Iraq and will stay there for a long time." Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat added, "For a very, very long time."

She may have been wrong about that. It depends on what configuration of mercenaries and US troops Barack Obama is able to pressure the Maliki government into retaining. But there is no question about her understanding of the effect of the US occupation at that time.

This is what the United States lied for. Saying that Saddam Hussein was partly to blame is just another lie.