Les Aspin (D-WI), “chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, appeared on ABC’s This Week [on August 4, 1991] and disparaged the intelligence on Iraq that preceded the [first] Gulf War. Asked about the quality of intelligence on Saddam Hussein and Iraq, Aspin described it as ‘not very good, not very good. We missed a whole different program he had there. He had a program that was developing a much more crude, more primitive way of developing nuclear weapons that we missed entirely. This was a much bigger program than we thought at the time, and in fact, as the polls showed at the time, the one really rallying call to the American public for war was the nuclear threat. If the public had really known that, there probably would have been a lot more support for the war, if they’d really known what was really going on a year ago, in August [1990], if they’d have known the extent of the Iraqi program, I think there would have been a lot more support for the use of force.’ ”
– Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney, Page 380