Courtesy of Josh Marshall (courtesy, in turn, of Bill Sherman) comes this NYT op-ed piece by Kenneth “The Threatening Storm” Pollack, refuting the comical claim that Iraq’s WMDs and WMD program were merely a figment of Bush Administration’s war-crazed imagination even as he points out the potentially grave questions to which the administration has opened itself. Pollack, as always, argues that while the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime was necessary, the timing (Spring 2003) wasn’t necessarily so necessary. It’s refreshing to come across someone who is able to criticize Bush (or at least his team, for stretching the WMD evidence to convince the public that we had to go in when we went in and no later) without a) resorting to hysterical Watergate-esque rhetoric about lies and scandal; b) advocating a fairly wholesale derelicition of duty when it comes to addressing the real, frightening, unconventional and therefore challenging security threats posted to us by the fascists, theocrats and terrorists of the Middle East; c) lambasting the United States as war criminals and oppressors while ignoring the several orders of magnitude more heinous behavior of Saddam Hussein and his ilk. Pollack’s piece, as well as anything else he’s written on the topic, is a must-read for any serious students of American foreign policy in the region.
(FYI: I’m never going to get too exercised about this WMD issue, as I’d happily roll into any given country tomorrow if it meant deposing another nightmarishly dictatorial regime (particularly one with which we were once complicit); this, to me, would be the liberal way to use our unprecedented military power. But it’s important to keep our politicians honest, if only because dishonesty or disingenuousness might make support for future actions more difficult to garner (the boy who cried wolf syndrome). We mustn’t be hamstrung in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia simply because the Bush Administration got lazy or timid about making the real case for invasion of Iraq and instead took a short cut by drumming up fears about relatively un-threatening WMD programs.)