House Iraq hearings will not focus on chemical weapons

The House Armed Services Committee will hold two hearings next week to study "lessons learned" in Iraq and to look into the number of troops that will be needed during reconstruction of the oil-rich country. But House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., will not follow the Senate's lead and investigate the failure of U.S. troops to find weapons of mass destruction.

Hunter, who led an eight-member congressional delegation to Iraq during the Memorial Day recess, thinks evidence of chemical or biological weapons will still be found, a spokesman said.

"There are a ton of sites that still need to be looked at, and he's convinced the sites will be found," the spokesman told CongressDaily. "We think there's a little bit of hysteria going on" among critics who say the Bush administration used the threat of weapons of mass destruction to justify attacking Saddam Hussein's forces.

The spokesman said a number of Iraqis told Hunter about burial sites where the banned weapons might have been stashed. Even if the weapons are not found, the spokesman said, "That wasn't the only reason we went into Iraq, and people seem to forget that."

The Senate Armed Services Committee will hold hearings to examine why no weapons were found. In an interview published Sunday in The Los Angeles Times, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said he does not think the administration was misleading, but that a hearing is needed because "the situation is one where the credibility of the administration and Congress is being challenged."

While the witness lists are still being drawn up and the timetable for the House hearings is not firm, Hunter's spokesman said the lawmaker intends to hold both sessions next week. Topics will include the Pentagon's assessment of lingering pockets of resistance in Iraq and the department's recent decision to indefinitely extend the Army 3rd Infantry Division's tour of duty there. About 150,000 U.S. troops remain in the country.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, without offering a timetable or discussing numbers of troops, said in April that the United States would stay in Iraq as long as it took to complete the mission. Former Army Secretary Thomas White, in an interview published Monday in USA Today, predicted that the Pentagon would have to keep more than 100,000 troops on the ground for a year or more.

Although Hunter plans to stay out of the weapons of mass destruction debate, there will be some House involvement. The House Intelligence Committee wants the CIA to determine whether the administration's prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons cache were inaccurate.