I’ve held back from commenting much about the war (except, I suppose, for my discussion of “High Noon,” i.e., “Cowboy” Bush as Gary Cooper, not John Wayne) because I don’t have anything to say that others haven’t said better. But I haven’t seen anyone (maybe I’ve missed it) say exactly the following.
It seems to me that there are only three possible grounds for opposing our war in Iraq:
1. Saddam was essentially telling the truth when he asserted that he had no weapons of mass destruction and that he had complied with UN resolutions.
2. He does have such weapons, but Hans Blix could have found them if given enough time, and Saddam could have been persuaded to destroy them.
3. He does have such weapons and wouldn’t have destroyed them, but so what? Containment has worked and would have continued to work.
Even the war critics don’t seem to believe No. 1.
No. 2 requires one to believe that Saddam could have been persuaded to abandon his weapons when even the imminent destruction of his country, including him personally and his family, hasn’t persuaded him.
And what of No. 3? What is it exactly that would have deterred Saddam from using his weapons, or providing them to terrorists? The threatened destruction of his power and his country? That’s what we’re doing now, and it hasn’t persuaded him.
Unless I’m missing something, all three of these anti-war arguments have been reduced to rubble with the Iraqi military capability.
I hold (1) and in the alternative (3), although not (2).
Where are these WMD, John? Next to the Niger uranium (British Psyops forgery)? Maybe hidden by the cheering crowds of Iraqi civilians (misunderestimation of US intelligence)? Tucked in the nuclear weapons’ hardened aluminum tubes (debunked by UN)? All our other arguments for the war are ending up on Urban Legends at snopes.com. Why is the WMD so much more self-evident? I’ll believe it when I see it.
We deterred Saddam from use of WMD in Gulf War I by threats of our own WMD. Obviously, that isn’t happening on the ground now.
Andrew,
I’ll believe there’s nothing if THAT is confirmed. Meanwhile, do you think
the 300 chem/bio protection suits and stash of antidote that were found
today were kept on hand to protect the innocent Iraqis from an expected
chemical attack by the Americans?
I also wonder why the chemical factory
discovered yesterday (or the day before) was camouflaged with hard sand,
surrounded by an electrical fence, had a military unit there, and was totally
unknown to the UNSCOM inspectors. No doubt the Iraqis didn’t want UNSCOM
or us to discover that they were making, what, fertilizer and hair dye?
As for No. 3, if Saddam provided vials of, say, anthrax to terrorists, there’d be no way to trace it back to him. Finally, if in fact he doesn’t have anything, why did he refuse to assist the inspectors in confirming that he destroyed stocks he was known to have?
From The Agonist (who is incidentally pro-war)
So yet another US/Fox News propaganda claim bites the dust. And I didn’t even mention yet the ongoing, totally duplicitious, rhetoric to link Saddam to 9/11 in the teeth of all of our own intelligence.
Agonist reported on the chemical suits a few minutes after the disclaimer I copied above. Let’s wait a day and see if that gets retracted, too. Sure, it’s possible that it’s true: Saddam is a very bad man. The idea he abuses the Red Crescent and flag of truce is eminently plausible. But what’s going on in our government that it cries ‘Wolf’ over and over??
But Andrew, presumably this “senior defense official” you quote is part of “our government.” Yet he seemed to discredit the claim about the chemical factory. Actually, I had heard those disclaimers before writing my comment. The fact is, I’m still not convinced by the disclaimer. I wonder why it was camouflaged, surrounded by electric fence, staffed with military folks, and was unknown to the inspectors. Maybe it hadn’t been used lately. But what happened to the stuff that was made when it was used. I think we’ll just have to wait and see. You think nothing will be found, i.e., that Saddam was essentially telling the truth about what he doesn’t have, and I think that something will, and that he wasn’t. We won’t know until the sand settles and we’ve had time to look in every nook and cranny.
Assuming the factory had been deserted for years, that’s pretty conclusive. I was sure you hadn’t seen the retraction; if you were the sort of person who would ignore that, it wouldn’t be worth reading your blog.
Eventually someone in our government may tell the truth, but usually only after the disinformation is out there. The chemical factory story, for example, appears to have been leaked first to the right-wing “Jerusalem Post”. Obviously not by an Iraqi!
And believe me, the disinformation is not aimed at Iraqi conscripts. And it isn’t aimed at our British allies; they are getting a different picture on BBC. It’s aimed at us. Aren’t you wondering how 45% of Americans think Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, which every US intelligence official denies? Is it the way GWB links the two every chance he gets? It bothers me a lot to think my government is 24/7 trying to deceive me.
As I recall, Jerusalem Post broke the story about the chemical plant and Foxnews picked it up. The Foxnews article said from the get-go that the Pentagon wanted to investigate the plant before they made any statements about it. I think this was a case of the news media scenting a story and running with it (it’s what they do, after all) and not our government trying to deceive us. Why would they leak a story that they were going to have to squash? Or if they did leak it, why not just continue the lie?
The missiles that Iraq shot into Kuwait, while not WMD, did exceed the range that Iraq was allowed to have. Previous to our going in, the regime denied having them. To me, this is enough evidence of their untruthfulness that I’m not going to believe they don’t have WMD on their say-so.
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