Peter Beinart has a puzzling piece in The Daily Beast in which he notices that conservative realists and neoconservatives have different views regarding American foreign policy. These differences were supposedly enough for it to be titled "The Right's Hypocrisy on Freedom." How such a vast section of the political spectrum, which encompasses at least two major foreign policy camps, can be collectively labeled hypocrites is left to the reader's imagination, but there is an additional assertion Beinart makes that is worth discussing. He writes in his opening paragraph (emphasis added):
The past few weeks have been clarifying. Ever since he took office, the press has been calling Barack Obama a ruthless realist who lacks the passion for democracy and liberty of his predecessor, George W. Bush. The fact that Bush’s war on terror provided a pretext for all manner of tyrants to crack down on their political opponents or that the Bush administration itself tortured terror suspects rarely intruded on the narrative. Bush was an idealist because he invaded Iraq, despite the fact that democracy became the war’s primary public rationale only after America failed to find weapons of mass destruction.
Early in the post-invasion period, columnists would complain that Coalition forces hadn't found "stockpiles" of WMD. But, as time has gone by, that qualifier has become rarer as critics grew more comfortable making assertions similar to the one above. More importantly, as Beinart does here, it is often stated that finding WMD was the primary rationale for the 2003 invasion. The first WMD claim is factually incorrect and the latter, logically defective.
Despite the growing conventional wisdom that there were no WMD, U.S. forces did find chemical weapons in post-Saddam Iraq. Not a lot, but some. And, some is not none. The military has explained what was found, what treaties Iraq had signed and violated, and why the weapons qualify as WMD. The Wikileaks document dump confirms this.
Do these weapons, alone, justify the invasion? No, but must columnists be so lazy with their language? Precision about what is said concerning WMD is no vice. Furthermore, false or not, the claim that there were no WMD makes no sense at all. Why would anyone expect to find any? To this day, I'm astounded that the military recovered what little they did.
When the police suspect someone of harboring illegal goods, they go to a judge and get a search warrant. They never call the suspect beforehand and tell him when they are dropping by. Surprise is a key element when conducting a search. Without it, you wouldn't expect to find anything.
Saddam Hussein had every reason to get rid of his WMD prior to the 2003 invasion. It is clear his strategy was to have his loyal troops melt into the population and create an insurgency that would drive the United States out of Iraq (a la Somalia in 1993). Destroying American resolve would be the key, and not finding WMD would obviously damage that cause (the absence of any reason for the invasion does damage to the cause, which is why critics have jumped on this reason - even though it was secondary at best). Therefore, it is self-evident that it was in Saddam’s interest to get rid of his WMD, and he had plenty of advanced notice to do so. Israeli intelligence believes he moved most of what he still had to Syria several weeks before the invasion. (The media might not care where Saddam's chemical weapons went, but Israel does). Anyway, given that Saddam had notice and incentive, why would anyone expect to find WMD post-invasion? The claim that there were no weapons of mass destruction, even if true, means nothing.
Not all weapons of mass destruction are the same. Nuclear weapons can do a lot more damage than a chemical attack. Saddam had had his chemical weapons for decades, but they were not the primary reason for the invasion. If you're worried about a dangerous weapon in the hand of an enemy - you go to war before he acquires them. Why provoke war once he has them? The war was about removing Saddam before he acquired WMD of the nuclear variety. America didn't invade Iraq to find WMD, it invaded Iraq to remove a regime before it might acquire nukes.
People of good faith can argue the state of Iraq's nuclear program in 2003. However, most people opposed to the invasion wouldn't reconsider even if Saddam stood on the brink of nuclear capability (their views on attacking Iran's nuclear program confirm this). The U.S. took out Saddam because the post-Gulf War containment strategy was failing, and America didn't want to wake up one day to find out Iraq was a nuclear power. North Korea is one of the most isolated countries on the planet, yet after 50 years of containment following an inconclusive war, they were able to develop a nuke. [Note: for various geopolitical reasons, removing the regime in Pyongyang before it went nuclear was impossible].
There was a lot of mention of Iraq's chemical and biological weapon capabilities pre-invasion. There are two reasons for this. First, it's an easier legal case to make when one argues about weapons a regime has, rather than ones they might want to acquire. Ones they may want don't physically exist, and are much harder to prove. Secondly, Tony Blair's aides believed that Saddam's continuing violation of the U.N. regarding his chemical weapons was the best legal justification for the invasion under British law.
Whether a stockpile was found or not, the fact that some were found satisfies the legal niceties the British worried about. This might explain why opponents of the war dropped the "stockpile" qualifier and began to declare there were no WMD at all. Many of these same people claim the Bush Administration misled the public about WMD, compounding the irony.
A policy of using force to prevent lunatic regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons is controversial in many outposts, but can it be taken off the table? Tough sanctions didn't stop North Korea and have yet to work on Iran. How many lunatic regimes with nukes can the world afford to tolerate? Can they be deterred like a conventional nation? If they supplied a nuke to a terrorist group and the investigation involved time and uncertainty, would the U.S. retaliate six months later - even if it was only 90% confident about who was responsible? The dangers of lunes with nukes was, and remains, the primary rationale for the 2003 invasion. Again, this means the U.S. didn't expect to find nuclear WMD.
The fact that the media still (mistakenly and illogically) claim there were no WMD in Iraq, makes one wonder whether they would accept any conclusions about a terrorist nuclear attack? In some ways, the meme about Iraqi WMD damages America's deterrence capability. A terrorist-sponsoring regime has many reasons to believe there would be little will to retaliate if there are enough vagaries regarding a surreptitious terrorist strike. By repeatedly misstating the facts about WMD, the media feeds this perception. This meme is false, deleterious to America's reputation, and detrimental to her national security. Is it any surprise that it has become a firmly entrenched piece of folklore for the left?
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