The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

cover story, “Decision Time,” in the Oct. 14, 2002 issue, agreeing to allow some of my comments to be quoted on the record. I wrote to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in response to his pub- lic comment that we had to trust the president on Iraqi WMD. Ident- ifying myself as a constituent who had had access to the data in ques- tion, I urged him to heed Ronald Reagan’s advice — “trust but veri- fy” — when assessing President Bush’s characterizations of the intelligence. And at the end of the month, I deliv- ered an address to my alma mater, Grinnell College, urg- ing that the U.S. government find its way back to “an honest discussion of issues, without deception.” I warned that “if we attack Iraq without U.N. authoriza- tion, we will not receive the 80 percent of war costs from foreigners we did last time; U.S. taxpayers will foot the entire bill and the continuing costs of military occupation as well.” In January 2003, I submitted a draft op-ed piece to the Washing- ton Pos t, arguing that the adminis- tration’s conflation of all three unconventional weapons categories under the “WMD” rubric was being used to scare people with mush- room clouds when the most trou- bling evidence involved the much less threatening chemical and biological weapons pro- grams. After Secretary Powell’s speech to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, I wrote to my home state’s principal newspaper, The Des Moines Register . I pointed out the “non-barking dog” in his speech, which the press seemed not to have noticed: Powell had not so much as mentioned the “uranium F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 47 The last straw for me was the failure to obtain an updated assessment of Iraq’s weapons programs following the reinsertion of U.N. inspectors. T HE R EMINGTON