The War In Iraq: Still Justified?
By Ryan Walsh (10/26/04)
In September of 2001, over 3,000 civilians perished in the bloodiest attack on American soil to date. Since that morning, the principal focus of the Bush Administration has been the war on terror. The President’s particular approach, dubbed the "Bush Doctrine," is to not only target specific terrorist individuals and organizations, but also the regimes which sustain them. Enter Iraq. Convinced of the growing threat the Hussein regime represented, Bush executed and Congress authorized military regime change.
I don’t care what James Carville says about the presidential elections; this November, it’s not about "the economy, stupid." November 2nd is a referendum on the merits of the Bush Doctrine, in theory and in practice, and on the decision to go to war in Iraq.
So do the reasons given for war in Iraq still hold up? Behind many of the justifications for military intervention (humanitarian, incubate democracy in Mid-East, etc.) was the post-9/11 apocalyptic scenario of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists. For this scenario even to be conceivable, the two underlying premises, WMD and terrorist connections, must be factual. Are they?
When the 9/11 Commission released its much anticipated report this summer, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and their amen corners in the three major TV networks unanimously found that the commission’s work proved "no connection" between Iraq and al Qaeda. It seems the paragons of journalistic acumen summarized the commission’s report much like a typical high school junior would summarize "The Grapes of Wrath:" by not reading it. On page 66, the report reads, "In March 1998, after Bin Laden’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Laden." The commission concludes (page 347) that the CIA’s "assessment on safe haven—that al Qaeda or associated operatives were present in Baghdad and in northeastern Iraq in an area under Kurdish control—was reasonable."
In 1998, when the CIA pushed for U-2 surveillance operations over bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, it was then counter-terrorism czar and now frequent Bush critic Richard Clarke who objected, warning that such an aggressive gesture might encourage bin Laden to, in Clarke’s words, "boogie to Baghdad" for protection.
The same evidence led the Clinton Justice Department to claim in a 1998 formal indictment of bin Laden that "on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq." The same year, Senate Intelligence Committee member John Kerry said of Iraq, "It is a threat with respect to the potential of terrorist activities on a global basis." And again, before voting to authorize the war in 2002, Kerry said on the Senate floor that Hussein "has supported and harbored terrorist groups…"
For once I can say that I’m with Kerry and Clinton on this one.
On the issue of WMD, the conventional wisdom suggests that since the illegal stockpiles didn’t exist, Iraq was not a threat. A few weeks ago, Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) released his expert assessment of the confused WMD situation. The most reported portion of the report was his conclusion that no major WMDs had existed in Iraq since 1991.
But Duelfer also maintains that Saddam possessed the "requisite knowledge base to restart the [chemical weapons] program eventually and, to the extent it did not threaten the Iraqi efforts to get out from under sanctions, to sustain the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future." The report further claims that the same was true of Saddam’s nuclear program.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in geopolitics to predict the course of events in lieu of U.S. and British military intervention. UN inspections would have continued, and nothing would have been discovered. The Security Council would have lifted sanctions, and within days, according to one Iraqi chemical weapons expert, Saddam would have clandestinely reconstituted chemical weapons, mustard gas in particular. Is this the alternative the "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" crowd prefers?
Contrary to popular mythology, Bush never said the threat from Iraq was imminent. Instead, he argued that, in a post-9/11 world, to act only once a threat reaches imminence is to wait until it is too late.
Who could disagree?
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