In
the aftermath of the Iraq war, intense scrutiny has fallen on
the search for weapons of mass destruction. The peace camp can
barely suppress its glee as each day passes with no smoking
vials or reactors, and that's perfectly understandable. It's
nice to see one's antagonists – especially this
sorry
mob – sweat
beneath the hot lamp of public skepticism. Bush accomplices
Tony Blair,
John
Howard of Australia, Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, and Roh Moo
Hyun of South Korea are catching the worst of it now, but
their problems may soon echo stateside. As Jim
Lobe notes, when the pulp journalists at Time,
Newsweek,
and U.S.
News quit lapping up your press releases, you have reason
to worry. Even the cowards who forsook
their prerogative to declare war now
vow to expose the truth. This scandal has potential. Still,
while those of us who opposed the war feel vindicated as its
pretext
unravels, we must not retroactively center our case on whether
or not Iraq had WMDs.
To
begin with, none of us were antiwar because we thought Saddam
Hussein an angel. We took hawk propaganda with an Everest of
salt, but few denied a kernel of reality to the exaggerations.
(Repetition works wonders.) We conceded that Saddam probably
owned some nasty stuff – likely far short of the spoiled child's
wish
list Colin Powell delivered to the U.N. – but we maintained
that said nastiness was insufficient cause for war. In fact,
the three dominant arguments against invasion were not contingent
on Iraq's virgin purity. First, none of the belligerents could
honestly claim self-defense
(maybe shadow belligerent Israel could, but more on them in
a second). Whatever was unknown about Iraq's arsenal, it was
known that they had no
real air force or ICBMs. Even if they had such capabilities,
why make them the exception to the deterrence rule? The U.S.
isn't bombing Russia,
China,
or North
Korea [author's note: this statement was true at time of
submission]. The self-preserving creeps in D.C. may not know
much, but they should know their own kind. Saddam was no martyr;
he wasn't going to risk his power or his hide tossing spitballs
at those who could actually hurt him. As for Israel, the nation
most threatened by Iraq, they
have nukes and, as they demonstrated in 1981, a superior
military they aren't afraid to use.
Second,
needless aggression leads to inexcusable
bloodshed. The neocons may regard all casualties as minor
debits on their National
Greatness bankcard, but the families, countrymen, and coreligionists
of the fallen see things differently. Which brings us to point
three, blowback.
Militarism breeds all sorts of unintended, though fairly predictable,
consequences. Whether these are terror
attacks, lost
freedoms, economic
catastrophe, new
demons for future exorcisms, or more
insidious burdens, the costs always dwarf the prizes. The
war was a terrible idea, and a few WMDs won't change that.
Still,
what's the harm in playing up their absence? For over a decade,
Iraq has been the most poked, prodded, and spied-on nation in
the world, and still nothing? "We
can't canvass a nation the size of California in X weeks"
merits more laughter as X increases. Put me virtually
anywhere in the United States, give me a car full of gas and
a Rand McNally roadmap, and I will find weapons
of mass destruction (or what
the U.S. would count as such in Iraq) before the tank needs
refilling. That one can't do the same in Iraq shows Saddam was
a minor leaguer, at worst. But, desperate to save face, the
War Party will pass off any discovery as their El
Dorado. Let them stumble over one high-strength
aluminum tube, and Pentagon alchemists will try to make
it gold.
The
Independent
Institute's Ivan
Eland takes this point a step further:
"The
press's intense focus on finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
may have an undesirable outcome. If weapons are eventually found,
the issue of the administration's deception could evaporate.
No one will focus on Bush's larger deception of the American
people in his effort to sell his military adventure."
(emphasis mine)
Tampering
with intelligence, manipulating
third party reports, even using
phony documents to "prove" that Saddam was developing
nukes – these may become Dubya's and Tony's blue
dresses, spattered with the DNA of American,
British,
and Iraqi dead.
Any weapons found now are pure serendipity; they cannot excuse
what has been done.
Sensing
trouble, the president's defenders are busy obfuscating. Max
Boot has straw-manned the WMD critique, summarizing it as
follows: "The president and prime minister deliberately
lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify an
invasion that they knew would show that no such weapons existed."
Max, you only wish it were that simple. Granted: Bush and Blair
bet that weapons would turn up somewhere. They lied when they
professed certainty about the massive size and dreadful nature
of those weapons. They lied when they asserted an al-Qaeda
connection. They lied when they hid exculpatory
evidence from the public while waving around distortions
and forgeries to strengthen their case. Most importantly, though,
they lied when they acted as if Iraqi weapons, real or imagined,
were their reason
for going to war in the first place.
Instead
of lending undue significance to weapons possession, we must
reiterate our original arguments against the war: it didn't
serve our national interests, it was immoral, and it could have
awful repercussions. Because as weeks become months with nothing
to show for the last invasion, the warmongers are already humming
a new tune: "You want WMDs? We'll give you WMDs. On
to Tehran!"
