The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged.

The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.

It increasingly emerges not only that we are lied to — no surprise — but that it is an explicit instrument of policy to do so. Wolfowitz goes on to make explicit what I’ve said several times was the most compelling hidden agenda for the war:

Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was “almost unnoticed but huge”. That was the prospect of the United States being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom. “Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door” towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups. Independent/UK

This is the way, then, that the invasion of Iraq did actually fit in the minds of the Bush cabal with the WoT® agenda, although their halfhearted attempts to assert that they were related were unconvincing. Not being explicit during the buildup to the war about its meeting basically longterm strategic rather than emergent defensive goals, one has to wonder about why it becomes acceptable to admit it immediately upon completion fo the war effort. Wolfowitz is no fool; I suppose he is confident no one is listening now, or that anyone who is has no power to do anything with their upset.

Related: The dysadmnistration’s disingenuousness has a Lewis-Carroll-like illogicality. Justifications seem to be cobbled together, invented on the fly, and have little coherency with one another.

Iraqi “intellectual capacity” for producing unconventional weapons was sufficient justification for the successful U.S.-led war against the country, a senior Bush administration official said today, addressing criticism that U.S. forces so far have found no illicit weapons there.

(…)

Explicitly addressing the lack of WMD stocks found in Iraq so far, Bolton said, “There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to exactly what it was we expected to find and when we expected to find it.”

Since the first Gulf War, he said, “The most fundamental, most important thing that was not destroyed [by international weapons inspectors] was the intellectual capacity in Iraq to recreate systems of weapons of mass destruction.”