With these and additional assertions, President Bush got his congressional resolution. This permitted the president to utilize force to ensure compliance with "all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions" and against the continuing threat posed by Iraq. No part of the law allowed war for the purpose of regime change, to compel changes in Iraqi government internal actions, or for any other purpose. The authority to use force was explicitly linked to the sole question of the alleged Iraqi weapons. If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, the U.N. resolutions by definition would have stood as fulfilled and the authorization for a U.S. war would expire. Thus, Iraqi weapons stood at the very heart of the entire Bush enterprise. The drive for war required not only the assertion that Iraq possessed these weapons, but also the avoidance of any judgment by UN inspectors that Saddam had been effectively disarmed.

The set of charges in the Bush October 2002 speech became a litany driven home by repetition in an orchestrated series of speeches and interviews of senior U.S. officials, statements by White House spokesmen and papers released by the White House. When UN inspectors returned to Iraq in December and the Baghdad government supplied a comprehensive statement of its weapons programs and efforts to disarm, discrediting that report became the next hurdle. The State Department and CIA jointly crafted a fact sheet that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell released on Dec. 19 with the assertion that Baghdad was in "material breach" of the U.N. disarmament resolutions. This document did not actually analyze the contents of the Iraqi declaration. Rather, it hit the same points featured in the previous U.S. litany of charges about Iraq. Remarkably, it was in the State/CIA fact sheet —not in Bush's State of the Union Address a month later—that the administration first used the bogus charge that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger, asserting that "The [Iraqi] Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger." It is also of interest that the State/CIA paper dropped Bush's huge exaggeration of Iraqi anthrax production. Neither point was picked up by the media at the time; no one called the Bush administration on its assertions.

As the U.N. inspectors began their intensive searches for weapons in Iraq, it became more apparent than ever that the administration case for war had not stuck. Widespread public demonstrations were growing larger; cities, towns and various associations were denouncing the march to war, and Bush's poll numbers were falling. In subfreezing weather on Jan.15, 2003, some 300,000 demonstrators hit the streets of Washington to protest. New polls showed the public evenly divided on war, and some also had a majority believing the administration had not made a sufficient case. On Jan. 27,
despite White House efforts to induce the United Nations inspection commissioners to take a hard line on Iraqi weapons, both Hans Blix of the general disarmament unit and Mohammed El Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported finding no significant evidence of the Iraqi weapons stockpiles the Bush people were claiming existed. In fact, in regard to the most significant technology, nuclear weapons, IAEA chief ElBaradei declared "We have to date found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s."