Try to contain your surprise, but I disagree with Jim Henley’s assessment of the validity of our reasons for going to war against the Baathists in Iraq.
Jim says that our failure to find actual WMDs means the whole thing was an unjustifiable farce. He picks apart two arguments commonly used by hawks to offset this: 1) Saddam Hussein was bad enough to warrant forcible removal from power, WMDs or no; 2) Saddam Hussein bluffed, we called him on it, no harm, no foul. Reason 1, sez Jim, is no good, because it requires a major rethinking of the role of American military power in the world, and moreover if the Bushies thought it would fly they’d have advanced it in the first place, since you didn’t need UN inspectors to prove that Saddam was a grotesque murderer of the highest order. Reason 2 won’t wash, he argues, because Saddam wasn’t bluffing: He and his underlings said over and over again that they had no WMDs, the U.S. would have said he had them no matter what, and Hans Blix only took the very moderately tough stance he did in order to placate us bellicose Americans, so in the end the Baathists were, if not telling the whole truth, a lot closer to the truth than the US/UK coalition.
Well, Reason One is simple enough to be done with: Yes, I think the American military should be used to depose tyrants and promote constitutional democracy. There’s obviously got to be a priority structure, since we don’t have the means or the manpower to fight the entire Axis of Evil plus the AoE Junior Auxilliary simultaneously, but generally speaking Gulf War II was in line with a foreign policy I was advocating during my wildest and wooliest collegiate Bush-hating days: Stop paying the bastards, and start ousting them. Obviously this doesn’t sit well with Jim, who, as a libertarian, is primarily concerned with leaving well enough alone. How leaving well enough alone in countries ruled by mass-murdering dictators is libertarian is something that continues to escape me, but in all fairness Jim’s been riding this train of thought for a long time now, so I guess he’s figured it out.
Reason Two is trickier. It’s certainly distasteful/distressing/disturbing (depending on how charitable you want to be) that our government and its intelligence wings either had no clue what was really going on in Iraq, or had a clue but decided to burnish it into a direct causus belli anyway. (Again, I really wouldn’t have cared if they’d argued for the removal of that monster by saying he’d kidnapped Santa Claus and was preparing to unleash Gidrah the Three-Headed Monster, but that’s neither here nor there for the moment.)
But was Saddam Hussein really not even bluffing that such weapons existed? Of course he was bluffing. He certainly knew his statements were never going to be taken at face value by the U.S. and U.K.; in diplomacy, whose statements are taken at face value? (Iran’s, I guess, if you’re the International Atomic Energy Agency, but that’s another story.) You can’t just go by what he or Tariq Aziz said on television to determine whether or not they were makin’ with the obfuscation. If this were a novel, they’d be what you’d call “unreliable narrators.” (Hell, even the anti-war types refused to believe Saddam was in any way allied with Islamic reactionism, despite any number of statements of his to the contrary. Funny how much credit they’re willing to give this man, who by the way had a Koran written in his own blood and paid the Islamic death-cult suicide bombers of Palestine 25 large a pop, on certain other matters: “Hey, if the man says he’s got no WMDs, he’s got no WMDs!”)
And he was, in fact, an obstructionist when it came to the inspections regime, quite independent of how the U.S. interpreted his moves. We know what legitimate UN-overseen disarmament looks like; we’ve seen it in South Africa, for instance. We did not see it in Iraq. Clearly, someone thought they had something to hide. And someone thought they had political intimidation points to score by acting like it. By all accounts Saddam himself believed he had WMDs, and was made to believe this by an entire chain of military and scientific officials scrambling desperately to convince him. They wouldn’t have put their necks on the line if WMDs weren’t something the man had, you know, asked for.
As the Kay Report made quite clear, Iraq most certainly did have a WMD development program. Some of its constituent parts were hidden, buried, rearranged, stashed in scientist’s home frigidaires, and integrated with civilian infrastructure; some of them were burned or shredded far from the prying eyes of international oversight. Why, exactly? So that the scientists could eat botulin-sicles and grow gardens in nuclear reactor parts? Because they didn’t want the UN inspectors to see them without their make-up on that morning?
This, to me, has always been the horse-shittiest part of the anti-war argument: that Saddam was harmless, forever and ever, amen. Clearly he and his government made every effort to stay just shy of openly pursuing the program, while continuing to preserve the means, materiel and knowledge necessary to reactivate it the second the heat was off. Anti-war forces conveniently forget that before the present administration called bullshit and forced the Iraq issue to the forefront of world attention once again, the cry wasn’t “Let the inspections and sanctions work,” it was “Let the inspections and sanctions end.” Saddam was gambling that, if he gathered enough sick babies into one or two hospitals, trotted in credulous BBC reporters, and said “we can’t afford medicine” over and over again, he could then sit back in one of his several dozen palaces and watch the world force an end to the sanctions regime that prevented him from fully purusing his WMD ambitions. And the sanctions were already splitting apart at the seams: even nations friendly to the U.S. were beginning to flout them, to say nothing of Syria, Jordan, Russia, and France. If 9/11 hadn’t happened I am positive they’d have been completely scuppered by now; as it was the make-or-break point was delayed by a few years, but make no mistake, it would only have been a delay, and then Saddam would have been free to pursue his clandestine weapons program with all the gusto of, well, seemingly every other Muslim dictatorship with Kim Jong Il on the speed dial. A war in which Saddam Hussein and his mob were removed from power permanently was and is the only way that this endless cat-and-mouse game could be stopped.
To recap, what exactly were we facing? An unspeakably brutal dictator, with no compunction about inflicting mass civilian casualties even within his own borders and on fellow Muslims, and with a proven record of doing just that repeatedly for decades on end; an un-deterrable dictator, who had invaded two of his neighbors, attacked a third, and seriously threatened two more, despite overwhelming evidence that these courses of action would be disastrous for himself and his nation; an opportunistic dictator, who had not hesitated to very publicly cast his lot with religious fundamentalism and its murderous vanguard in Palestine and Kurdistan, even after our post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan showed that such alliances were potentially fatal for the states involved; an ambitious dictator, who had used WMDs in the past and greatly desired to maintain the ability to use them again in the future despite the tremendous personal and financial risks inherent in the pursuit; a patient dictator, willing to play a decade-long waiting game with the world at the direct expense of his citizenry until international inertia and greed in Europe, Russia, and the Mid-East won out once again, leaving him free to pursue weapons that he felt would make him, at long last, untouchable. Throw in what I think was our moral obligation to end the reign of this dictator we once supported, over a people whom, after Gulf War I, we betrayed, and explain to me again: Why was this war not a good idea?
