The report concluded that war on Iraq would cause a “grave humanitarian disaster,” with potential casualties among children in “the tens of thousands, and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”

But these reports received little attention at the time.

Much like the cautionary warnings from some quarters of the U.S. intelligence community about strategic risks from the invasion, warnings about the human cost of the war did not generally catch the eye of mainstream journalists or politicians in Congress.

Congressional Enablers

Two of those members of Congress, who brushed aside warnings of human catastrophe in Iraq, remain in contention for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

In the U.S. Senate, Republican John McCain and Democrat Hillary Clinton unquestioningly accepted the Bush administration’s trumped-up arguments for war, and opted to authorize military action in a fateful vote on Oct. 10, 2002.

McCain was one of Bush’s staunchest and most steadfast allies in Congress, using his “credibility” as a Vietnam War hero to push the invasion forward. He argued that Iraq posed a “a clear and present danger to the United States of America,” and claimed that “we will be welcomed [by the Iraqi people] as liberators.”

Although she was a member of the opposition party, Clinton was no less vocal in endorsing all of the administration’s rationales for war.

While she questioned the wisdom of launching a “unilateral war,” she also warned against relying on the United Nations to take the necessary action against the Iraqi government, reiterating the “Clinton Doctrine,” once articulated by her husband, that “we will act multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary.”

In explaining her vote to authorize the invasion, Sen. Clinton argued in a floor speech on Oct. 10, 2002, that “if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

She asserted that the threat posed by Iraq to U.S. national security was “undisputed,” and that the only questions remaining were “what should we do about it?” and “how, when, and with whom?”

Despite Sen. Clinton’s assertion, Iraq’s alleged threat to U.S national security was, in fact, adamantly disputed – by think tanks and NGOs, antiwar activists and academics, foreign governments and international organizations, and a former UN weapons inspector. Scott Ritter, an American who served as a weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998, rightly argued that Iraq’s WMD arsenal had been eliminated in the 1990s.

A Different Agenda

In the years after his service as a weapons inspector, Ritter also asserted that the UN inspections process had another agenda. The U.S. government, from the beginning of the inspections in 1991, was more interested in regime change than it was with Iraq’s disarmament, Ritter alleged.

A former U.S. Marine officer, Ritter claimed that from day one, the U.S. was “manipulating, suppressing and fatally undermining the inspections process in support of a different agenda – regime change.”

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