Asymmetrical Information

The really interesting question is: if we had found strong evidence of WMD would things have gone better in the war?

These libertarians sound interesting. Where can I read their writings?

Anyway, nobody is claiming that the Spectator story is particularly credible, and it actually makes more sense as a "Bush is incompetent" hit piece than the scoop of the decade that it clearly isn't.

Also, I don't think there was quite the consensus that Julian claims there was that the WMDs would dance to Damascus upon an invasion.

I think you're missing Julian's point. Opponents of the war did not merely say, "WMDs don't justify going to war." They said, "If Iraq has WMDs, going to war increases the risk of them falling into the hands of dangerous people." And that's exactly what The Spectator article alleges -- that the administration covered up the evidence of WMDs because it made them look inept for having let them get taken by Bad People.

Glen, that only holds if you don't view Saddam as a Dangerous People. War opponents weren't only worried about Saddam as a possible source for terrorists, but Saddam as a source of terror himself.

In intelligence analysis there are always two
questions. One, what is the capacity of the enemy and two, what is the intentions of the enemy?

The real question that was never addressed in the run-up to war was what were Saddam's intentions.

I for the life of me could never see why it would ever be in his interest to give WMD's to terrorists he did not control. This entire rational for the war never made any sense.

We rid Iraq of a vicious dictator and his odious sons, giving Iraq a chance to be a Country That Doesn't Suck.

And that more than enough justification.

If one thinks that the UN resolutions ought to mean something, then Iraqi transgressions can't be ignored forever. Saddam bought France and Russia off. There would never have been a diplomatic resolution. In the meantime, he was violating the armistice he signed by shooting at our planes in the no fly zone.

The WMD question was never the sole reason for removing Saddam.

Two points. One, recall the weeks after the initial overthrow of Saddam's government. Looting on an international scale, whether by the CIA, international organized crime, Al Quaeda, or an uprising of Iraqi citizens with a black market ready to absorb power plants and other items of value and also with a means to transport and deliver said items might have removed about anything. Including, perhaps, Iran's beginnings of the nuclear bombs? Or chemical stores that might be providing a sense of security in N. Korea or across the Russian landscape?

Two. The initial Iraqi government is gone. That particular goal was accomplished years ago, we even got the Iraqis to expose and condemn the former ruler. Very few governments would be content to have this kind of intervention on their watch; we have a club to wield. Except for the 'Hanoi Jane's in Washington willing to increase the likelihood of getting our soldiers killed by openly supporting and encouraging those shooting at our troops. Reid and others are showing ignorant ambition rather than patriotism or care for the uniformed services.

And this isn't new. 40 years ago veterans returning home, after being drafted and serving in Vietnam, were spit on and reviled. The Democratic party in particular was horrified at what the 'industrial military complex' was doing to the Vietnam people, and angry at the soldiers drafted to obey orders. Today, Sen. Reid shows similar contempt for the danger he creates for US soldiers.

I grew up with a reproduction poster from WWII, 'Loose Lips Sink Ships'.

I recall when the WMD rationale was first raised. It sounded like a false claim at the time, but was useful in putting the war forward. But it sounded like a useful PR rationale, and I just assumed most people accepted it that way -- certain pigheads in Congress needed a Big Bogeyman before they would allow themselves to be seen to, reluctantly, do their job.

I recall Clinton sent troops to Kosovo. They are still there, aren't they? The army still operates out of the bases created in the aftermath of WWII in Germany. We still have troops stationed in post-WWII Japan. What is so surprising that we have troops still in Iraq? What is the rush to bring them home? Why not recall the Clinton brigades, and the other overseas detachments? How do these detachments continue to survive the regular base closings shuffle?

Brad;

You will also notice that there is no call for a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan.

monkeyboy,

There will be shortly a call to leave Afghanistan if the causulties increase there. How do you expect us to stay in Afghanistan after we are defeated in Iraq? As our losses mount and the Islamic fundamentalist move into the Pak-Afhan border to fight. How long? The Russians stayed for 10 years and 100K dead (I think). How many German troops will die before they will pull-out for America's war? How long would you support the US being in Afghanistan if we start taking losses on an Iraq scale?

Losing in Iraq will mean losing in Afghanistan in short order.

The question about finding WMD is really a case of mass moving of the goalposts. The argument wasn't that Saddam didn't have WMD, it was that he was a substantial enough menace to warrant shifting our efforts from Afghanistan.

The whole point of pre-emptive war is to take out someone who is a threat to you before they have a chance to attack.

Back in my Navy days, in the late 90s, it was assumed that Saddam had nerve gas. While deploying overseas, we trained for a nerve gas attack. But the scenario under which Saddam would attack was out of desperation because it was believed -- as born out by intelligence reports at the time -- that he was a toothless, contained dictator.

The fact that Saddam turned out to not only be a threat, but that he didn't possess the weapons that were said to make him so dangerous only makes our error in invading that much worse. But, finding unconventional weapons only retroactively justifies the invasion if you basically forget the four or five months leading up to the war.

But, suggesting that if we'd found unconventional weapons that the American people would still support the war ignores essentially five years of incompetence in rebuilding Iraq. More people might today say that we were justified in invading, but it's doubtful that anyone would really excuse turning the country into the mess it's in just because we found cannisters of mustard gas.

But, suggesting that if we'd found unconventional weapons that the American people would still support the war ignores essentially five years of incompetence in rebuilding Iraq. More people might today say that we were justified in invading, but it's doubtful that anyone would really excuse turning the country into the mess it's in just because we found cannisters of mustard gas.

I'm not sure I agree with Eric's overall point here, but I do think that we'd be seeing the same kind of opposition in Iraq, and the political situation domestically would be roughly the same today, even if we had found an active nuclear program with high-enriched uranium sources and so on.

After all, if we went in there to destroy Iraq's WMD capability and Iraq's WMD development capability, those objectives were clearly achieved once we finished shipping Iraq's uranium stockpile out of Tuwaitha. Everything after that could be characterised as mission creep, nation-building, etc. and secondary to our real purpose in invading Iraq. Just as now, there's plenty in the authorising resolutions you can point to, to argue that these purposes were there from the very beginning, only the public was too dumb to actually read what Congress had signed off on. But from a PR perspective, building a stable state in Iraq is not a particularly high priority for most Americans, so whether it appears in the authorising resolutions is irrelevant.

We may feel sorry for the Iraqis, but fundamentally, they're over there, and we're over here. A out-and-out civil war in Iraq may be a problem for its neighbours, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, who will have to deal both with refugees and with a spillover of open violence and insurrection into their border provinces. But we are thousands of miles away.

We may feel sorry for the Iraqis, but fundamentally, they're over there, and we're over here. A out-and-out civil war in Iraq may be a problem for its neighbours, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, who will have to deal both with refugees and with a spillover of open violence and insurrection into their border provinces. But we are thousands of miles away.

A little logic like that, and a lot of historical ignorance of US history in Middle Eastern affairs, makes it surprisingly easy to walk away from a problem that we helped to create over a course of decades, albeit non-exclusively and non-majoritarianly (the USSR, China, and France have considerably more dirty laundry in that one, but a lot less will to hang it out for drying).

Brad - the 5,000 or so troops in Kosovo are not being killed on a regular basis, and are clearly not making the situation worse there. Those calling for the removal of troops from Iraq believe that it our presence is making the situation worse, or at least not improving the situation. If so, why should we continue to waste resources and American lives so war supporters can save face by not admitting that the invasion was a mistake?

buffpilot - had we not invaded Iraq, and concentrated our efforts in Afghanistan, the Taliban would most likely not be so 'resurgent' at present.

RMc - unfortunately, Iraq has turned out to be 'A Country that Sucks much, much, more that before'. This was certainly a less than remote probability at the outset of our invasion. Perhaps if we had given more consideration to this possibility before invading we wouldn't have made the mistake.

MarkD - no, WMDs were not the only reason for the invasion, however it was clearly the primary reason in the eyes of the American public. Condi Rice's comment that 'we don't want the smoking gun to be in the form of a mushroom cloud' is an example of the rhetoric used by war proponents to influence the voting public into thinking that Saddam posed a significant threat.
Certainly, violation of UN resolutions does warrant some type of sanction, military or economic, however do you currently believe that enforcing the no-fly zone was worth the 3,200 American lives lost, not to mention the economic cost? I seriously doubt any reasonable person would.

The history is important only in how it reveals what is likely to happen in the future. It's not important to me who did what. What IS important is what will happen if we leave.

If we leave Iraq, Iran will most likely take over, either directly or indirectly. Many in Iraq will resist, especially the Kurds. An increasingly bloody civil war will result. If such a civil war doesn't occur, then that will be worse as it will mean that Iran is firmly in control and can use the resources of Iraq to continue it's war on the Western world.

I'm am amazed that there are people who honestly believe that things won't get much worse in the Middle East if we leave and that the USA will be better off overall if we leave.

EI

By way of introduction, I am one of those people who supported the war (not that it made any difference in my case) and will not admit that I was wrong.
Why was I right? because under the circumstances it made sense to believe that Saddam had WMDs. I mean, what other reason could there be for Saddam to obstruct UN inspections? if the head of the CIA declared that he saw the WMDs himself, that would not mean as much to me. Even if I saw myself the WMDs, that would not mean much to me, since I am not very good at spotting WMDs.

Well, Saddam fooled me and a lot of other people, but he paid for it with his life.

Why bother proving that the free market does stuff better? well, I agree with Pericles: happiness is the fruit of freedom (and freedom the fruit of valor). But that's not enough, because there is more than happiness to life: it is also necessary to survive, and history shows that the happiest societies are not always those that survive. For instance, hunter/gatherers were probably happier than agriculturalists, but they were swamped by the latter. So it is important to show that the free market not only makes people happy, but can survive as well.

Eric B:

Maybe I'm halucinating, but I have this odd memory of the former secretary of state presenting evidence to the UN about an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Anyway, without nukes, Iraq simply couldn't have been much of a threat to us. They could have tried to support a terrorist attack like 9/11, but we already have a good way to handle that kind of attack done by nations with fixed addresses. After all, any number of countries could launch some missiles at us from a ship or two just out of our territory, and do far worse than the 9/11 attack. They don't, because they know how the war will end. (In the case of a few countries, that will be nasty for us, too. For most, it will just be us with a few thousand dead, and them with smoldering ruins that used to be cities.)

More fundamentally, there were all kinds of deeply goofy arguments about how we were going to turn Iraq into a democracy, as well as true statements that Saddam was a brutal thug running a police state with a lot of blood on its hands. But without the notion that Iraq was a threat to us, there would have been zero support for invading.

Now, it's reasonable to say "this was a good decision on the evidence we had then, even though it was a mistake given what we know now." But it's not reaonable to try to make the invasion of Iraq out as independent of the belief that they were developing nukes or some such thing to hand out to Al Qaida.

We found 500 tons of yellowcake in Iraq. We also found stockpiles of weapons containing Sarin Gas. These were old weapons, in some cases dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, but the Sarin Gas was still deadly. We found plans to reinstitute the Nuclear Weapons Program once the UN inspection regime fell apart and the rest of the world decided to forget all about the danger of Saddam Hussein.

We were still in a state of war with Iraq because there was never a peace treaty following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the institution of Operation Desert Storm to eject him. We had an armistice that he violated on a daily basis by firing on or targeting U.S. and British aircraft. This final element is, of course, a casus belli all by itself.

There was more than sufficient cause to enter Iraq and topple Hussein.

There was a surprisingly advanced nuclear weapons program being run by an Arab dictator who was a long-time enemy of the US, and that program was eliminated solely because of the invasion of Iraq. But because it was in Libya, apparently it does not count.

Had the same program been found in Iraq, I don't think the current debate would not have changed much.

So, Libya gave up their nuclear program, and North Korea tested a bomb, and Iran is trying to get one. Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look to me like an unambiguous trail of success. It is good that Libya doesn't have a nuclear program anymore, but I sure don't see why that was a forseeable reason to invade Iraq. I suppose "make a horrible example of someone to keep the rest in line" makes as much sense as anything in that region, but that isn't exactly the argument we got for going to war.

The strong argument for going to war in Iraq was that they posed a threat, because they had the potential to give nukes to terrorists. Without that, they weren't a threat. (They could outfit the terrorists with nerve gas or other nasty stuff, but the scale of the attack isn't nearly the same. And again, any country can have their spy agency or special forces plant bombs in our country. There's a well-defined response to that--we declare war and bomb them into the stone age. Indeed, that's the reason why there was virtually no resistance to invading Afghanistan. People sheltering there attacked us, they didn't hand those people over and apologize, so we did the regime change thing on them.

An amazing percentage of Iraq was weapons depots under Saddam Hussein
and on most of these military reserves the United States found massive
quantities of an insecticide stored underground. The amounts in question
were vastly larger than Iraq, or the whole of the Middle East, could
conceivably need as insecticides and they were stored in a manner inconsistent
with peaceful use.

The insecticide in question can, without too much effort, be turned
into a variety of chemical weapons. In fact this is a pragmatic and
inexpensive path to follow in making chemical weapons. The insecticide
is 90% of the way to being a chemical weapon and can be bought on the
world marketplace. The hard part of the process had already been done
so to speak.

The United States also found over 3,000 Iraqi artillery shells loaded
with chemical weapons.

Further the United States government was not the only group surprised
by the non-use of chemical weapons by the Iraqi government during the
U.S. invasion; along with many others, Iraqi military leaders, as they
have testified, were caught by surprise.

Look we found a massive chemical weapons program. What we didn't find
was an active program. Clearly Saddam Hussein had the means in place
to make chemical weapons fairly quickly. Iraqi troops were trained
to use chemical weapons and were equipped with gas masks.

Clearly Saddam made the political and strategic decision not to use
chemical weapons and he made it in the months before the invasion
because if Iraq had wanted chemical weapons it had the means in place
to make and use them.

The U.S. also found a substantial nuclear weapons program. It wasn't
in Iraq but in Libya. But the scientists in the Libyan program were
mostly Iraqi. The Libyan program was a collaboration between Iraq,
North Korea, and Libya. Again it makes sense. Why would Saddam
try to develop nuclear weapons within Iraq while it was under enormous
scrutiny?

Saddam Hussein spent more money trying to develop nuclear weapons in
the 1980s than the U.S. spent during the Manhatten Project. What was
the most valuable thing he had to show for it? The accumulated
knowledge of the people involved.

Did they shut down the nuclear weapons development program as was promised
to the world?

They did no such thing.

A couple of questions have been puzzling me for a while now. Just how long did Iraq have a "vicious dictator and his odious sons" before we invaded - the second time? (I seem to recall that it was quite a few years, including a previous war as well as a string of sanction violations, but I don't seem to recall any major discussions in the Republican platform prior to the 2000 election about an urgent need to remove him / them.)

Of course I also recall that after the election we suffered the attacks on 9/11. However, it's well-known now - and was known prior to the invasion, if you honestly looked at the evidence - that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. So my second question is what was the real rationale to shift the War on Terror to Iraq?

And, yes, I've heard that Saddam was a threat to provide WMD to terrorist organizations. But if he did have WMD, and given his aggressive history (Iran & Kuwait), why would he provide them to organizations with which he had no or only tenuous historical connections rather than using them for his own purposes?

Any answers from the war-firsters on these questions would be appreciated.

Cheers,

If Saddam had the weaponry he was acting like he had, he also would have been a threat to use it on neighboring countries. He's done that before (with nerve gas), after all, and that kind of action has ripple effects that reach us - even without considering how it would affect half the world's oil and millions of violent fanatics...

With a few nukes, he would have the capability of wiping out Israel - and if you didn't worry about how we'd deal with that, you should have worried about what the Israelis were likely to do to prevent it - or blown up half the middle-eastern oil fields in order to increase the value of his own oil. With just the nerve gas that the UN inspectors knew once existed and is still unaccounted for, he probably wasn't a threat to Israel, but he could have used it on the Kurds, annihilated Kuwait, or rendered most of the oil fields in neighboring nations unusable...

If we leave Iraq, viva la Kurdistan. We cannot screw the Kurds over again. If Iraq does break out into civil war, the Kurds should have their own nation and we should support them.

Half Canadian:

"Cannot" and "should not" aren't the same. We clearly can screw our allies. Just ask the among survivors among our allies in Vietnam who didn't manage to get out.

The real question that was never addressed in the run-up to war was what were Saddam's intentions.

No, it was. The ISG report is just one example:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol1_rsi_key-findings.htm

if you honestly looked at the evidence..that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.

No one has said such a thing. Its a strawman created by the left. However, Iraq was tied into the first WTC bombing, at least in providing intelligence, logistics, and sanctuary.

no, WMDs were not the only reason for the invasion, however it was clearly the primary reason in the eyes of the American public

To be more precise, the American media. They ran WMD stories 24/7 because it was sexier than blathering on about twelve UN Resolutions.

Iraq simply couldn't have been much of a threat to us. They could have tried to support a terrorist attack like 9/11, but we already have a good way to handle that kind of attack done by nations with fixed addresses

Thats incredibly short-sighted, esp considering the title of this blog. Saddam [and now Ahmadinejad] was quite aware of the danger of US retaliation. Do you really think they would risk skylining themsleves when its so much easier to attack via terrorist proxies? Don't forget, primitive nukes do not leave a distinctive fingerprint [also a problem we will have with Iran], there are too many commonalities. We would not know with 100% certainty where the nukes came from [esp if CIA is too busy fighting turf wars with State, instead of analyzing intel]

we already have a good way to handle that kind of attack done by nations with fixed addresses

Sounds like the Democrat strategy: let an American city be vaporized before we respond. Which city do you live in? Which one should we sacrifice so we can all feel justified in launching a war? And how many millions of innocents will we murder in retaliation for one madman?

Bush is guilty of preventing a WMD attack on US soil. I think future American leaders will learn from him, and decide that the political risks do not justify pre-emptive action. Better to let another Pearl Harbor happen than go down that road again, because our liberal weasels will snipe and undermine the war effort for poltical gain, at the expense of our troops and the nation.

Also consider, re your MADD deterrant: what matters is whether some madman believes he can get away with an anonymous proxy attack, not whether he can actually get away with it.

Bush is guilty of preventing a WMD attack on US soil.

I'm guilty of preventing lion attacks in my 14th floor office by wearing my anti-lion pendant, and I defy you to prove differently. Nothing we've learned about Iraq since the invasion supports the contention that there was any threat at all of an attack with WMDs.

On June 18 2004 V Putin said on Russian TV (inter alia) "I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received..information that official organs of Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations." Putin may repeat his statement & perhaps provide documentary proof in 2008.