Americans were told by President Bush and his administration that the U.S. was going to war with Iraq because of the imminent threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism.
"Saddam was a known and a visible threat, and we kept deferring dealing with him. The previous administration had, and even the incoming Bush administration was conducting a rather leisurely review of Iraq. Sept. 11 said, "Be careful. You don't have unlimited time to deal with these threats." So naturally attention focused on a threat that we had known and understood, but hadn't acted on." Quoted from Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defence Policy Board.
He went on to say "Weapons of mass destruction were, of course, an important part of the rationale. We knew that Saddam had them. The U.N. had determined that he had chemical and biological weapons, that he had a nuclear program that was discovered in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. He refused to account for those weapons.
"The inspectors had been constructively dismissed from Iraq in 1998. We knew there was activity hiding things. We knew the organization responsible for hiding them. So the picture was reasonably clear, although incomplete. He had weapons, he was moving them around, he had an organization to hide them and he wouldn't account for them. So it was an obvious concern. Sept. 11 had focused everyone's attention on what terrorists could do if they were to employ weapons of mass destruction. …"
This is a quote from Rishard Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations; director of policy planning at the State Department, March 2001 - June 2003:
"I think the first thing to say about this war is that it was an elective war. It was a war of choice. We didn't have to go to war against Iraq; certainly not when we did, certainly not how we did it. I think the principal reason we did, from my point of view, was weapons of mass destruction. We knew that the Iraqis had chemical and biological weapons. They had a history of using chemical weapons. We obviously also knew their history of trying to acquire nuclear weapons. For many of us, a powerful argument was simply that we did not want to live with that uncertainty about what the Iraqis might do with it, whether they'd use them directly, whether they'd hand them off to terrorists. So war, if you will, was a policy choice to essentially interrupt the possibility that the Iraqis would either use or hand off weapons of mass destruction."
From
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...necessary.html