Posted on 06/05/2003 9:49:36 AM PDT by knighthawk
About a month ago I wrote that opponents of the war to depose Saddam Hussein haven't had much luck justifying their position after the war was over. Their worst predictions never materialized: There was no quagmire à la Vietnam, no masses of refugees, no environmental disasters. Dismantling Iraq's Baathist tyranny cost fewer American casualties than the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon alone. Mass graves proved beyond any doubt the foul nature of Saddam's regime, and many Iraqis greeted the coalition forces as liberators.
Opponents, I wrote in April, would cling to one remaining shred of argument to justify their stand. Evidence for Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was, at most, ambiguous. So far, coalition forces discovered only some mobile laboratories capable of dual use, but no actual biological or chemical weapons.
No WMDs being the naysayers' only ammunition left, I suggested they'd try to make the most of it --and so they have. What was a trickle a month ago, became a flood last week. On the Sunday network talk shows of America the central topic was the absence of evidence of WMDs, and how it deprived President Bush's coalition of its casus belli.
As the talking heads went to town on the topic, supporters of the war assumed a curiously defensive stance. Many suggested WMDs were never a central issue; the coalition went to war mainly to rid the Iraqi people of a murderous tyrant.
This is nonsense. Much as one understands the impulse to justify the war by the one factor for which the evidence is overwhelming, namely Saddam's monstrosity, there are dozens of monstrous despots in the world. No one contemplates dethroning them all. Rescuing the Iraqi people, while a bonus, is misleading as a reason for war. The U.S. and its allies couldn't and shouldn't be in the business of surgically removing all malignancies from the body politic of all nations, only the ones that, like Saddam, threaten to metastasize.
Equally nonsensical is the supporters' implied acquiescence in the opponents' assertion that Saddam's regime had no WMDs. Quite apart from the truism that an absence of evidence is no evidence of absence, if there ever was anything that required no proof, it was Saddam's relationship with WMDs. He had used them, for crying out loud. He gassed some of Iraq's own Kurdish people. He also had a nuclear program until Israel demolished his French-built reactor in 1981, and -- as Con Coughlin, author of Saddam: The Secret Life, pointed out in the British press this week -- he had about 360 tonnes of chemical warfare agents unaccounted for, including VX nerve agents and anthrax spores, when he kicked out the UN weapons inspectors in 1998.
These are undisputed facts. They dwarf the question of whether Saddam destroyed his chemical and biological agents after 1998 or merely hid them well enough to go undetected by the coalition forces. Given that his regime had the know-how, the intention, and the track-record of making and using chemical weapons, combined with the mobile laboratories discovered after the war, for all practical purposes Saddam possessed WMDs. As Barbara Amiel put it in The Daily Telegraph in April: "It doesn't matter whether or not you have a stockpile so long as you have dual-use facilities. The factory that produces fertilizer and gets the all-clear by the UN on a Friday can produce chemical weapons the next week."
Last week President Bush finally made the same point while speaking in Poland, but this came only after weeks of floundering by administration spokespersons and officials, who alternately kept promising that WMD stockpiles or delivery systems would eventually be found in Iraq, or asserting that WMDs were not the main reason for going to war anyway.
Such arguments are lame. They only distract from the core equation, which is: Tyrants+Technology=WMDs.
It isn't technical systems but political ones that endanger the security of the world. If a sociopathic tyrant has the technology and the evil intentions, he must be deemed to have weapons of mass destruction, whether he possesses a current stockpile or not. If he doesn't have nukes today, he'll have them tomorrow. His scientists aren't trying to figure out how to cure smallpox, but how to weaponize it. This is the real point; the rest is piffle.
When talking of piffle, one's mind inevitably turns to nation-building. In 2000, George W. Bush maintained that nation-building was one thing in which America wouldn't engage under his administration. As candidate, Governor Bush would have deposed Saddam, then gone home. He would have offered postwar aid, along with the warning that Iraqis could do whatever they wanted, but if they wanted another Saddam, America would get rid of him, too. Iraqis could get their future shipments of Americana from the vaults of Fort Knox or from the barracks of Fort Bragg: It was their choice.
Barely three years later President Bush deposed Saddam, but then he offered to stay in Iraq and build a nation. Now the Iraqis have taken him at his word. Surly and whining, they wait for him to fix things, and blame him if he doesn't fix them fast enough. It's the White House's attempts at nation-building that offer critics their best chances at America-bashing -- or, as Mark Steyn, the Mozart of political columnists, described it in The Daily Telegraph this week -- it's all about "round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all Rumsfeld's fault."
The Iranian scholar Amir Taheri wrote in the National Post this week that the U.S. makes its presence felt, beneficially for the most part, in many regions. America is the "unannounced guarantor" of ceasefire between Morocco and Algeria; the "very existence of Jordan" is due to U.S. support, and so on. "In some cases, the Americans might stay longer than they need to," Mr. Taheri wrote, "but so far they have seldom left without changing the context that led to their involvement."
All very true, but it still leaves open the question of nation-building. I don't think it takes a neo-isolationist to have reservations about building any nation other than one's own. Governor Bush's instincts may have been sounder in this regard than President Bush's.
They just wanted to deflect attention from Clinton's scandals.
:^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.