Frontpagemag.com
Andrew Sullivan and Pete Wehner have been having a back and
"new">forth about whether the Iraq War was worth it. Wehner argues ably that we have won a major victory over the terrorists in Iraq, but in the course of making a strong case on those grounds lets Andrew get a way with misrepresenting what the war was about to begin with. Since Andrew’s misrepresentation is common to virtually every critic of the war, it is worth confronting.
According to Andrew “the “fundamental casus belli” was “WMDS” and this causus belli turned out to be “false.” Put this way, the statement is neither true nor false. It is vacuous. WMDs were mentioned, o f course, by administration officials, by Democrats who supported the war, and so forth.
The question remains, however: In what way were they mentioned and how were they connected to the rationale for the invasion? Thus, if Andrew means that the war was fought because Saddam’s regime was believed to have stockpiles of WMDS and was by that very fact an imminent threat, he is wrong and his statement is false. There is no statement by Bush to that effect.
On the contrary, on the eve of the war he said the opposite — that Iraq was not an imminent threat. Moreover, he gave Saddam and his reprehensible sons two days to leave the country in which case the United States would not invade — WMDs or no. In other words, Iraq’s possession of WMDs was not the casus belli of the war.
We should pause for a moment here, because every critic of the war that I am aware of premises his or criticism on the same claim — a claim that is demonstrably false . The threat that Saddam presented was his systematic violaton of the truce agreement in the Gulf War, and his defiance of 17 Security Council attempts to enforce the truce. This behavior showed that he was determined to build WMDs and become an imminent threat, which in a post-9/11 world Bush declared unacceptable. Hence, in the summer of 2002 (the war began the following March) there were no UN inspectors in Iraq (and had not been any for four years), although they were the most crucial part of the Gulf War truce agreement, and were there to prevent Saddam from carrying out his desire to acquire WMDs.
In this situation, Bush put 100,000 American troops on the Iraqi border and Saddam allowed the inspectors to return. Saddam then resumed his cat-and-mouse game of thwarting the inspectors and their efforts to keep him from pursuing his WMD dreams. So Saddam, in effect, was calling our bluff.
Every critic of the war that I am aware of pretends to support intern ational law, but none of them explains how allowing a criminal regime to defy international law on such a momentous issue with no consquence would accomplish that end. The reason we went to war is that, in December 2002, Saddam Hussein defied a unanimous UN Security Council ultimatum over his defiance of the arms control agreements of the 1991 truce, and because withdrawing our troops and thereby capitulating to an aggressor was not an option — and would not have been for any US president, which is why the entire Clinton national security team supported the invasion.
The question of whether the war was worth it begins with the question of what the consequences would have been of allowing the most destabilizing national leader in the Middle East to destroy the framework of international law and proceed with his programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The argument over the war, as conducted by Andrew Sullivan and others, is a charade . Because it is built on false premises, it is without substance, and reflects the irresponsible posture of the opposition that we have witnessed over the last five years, as Ben Johnson and I have shown in our book The Party of Defeat (whose argument, by the way, not a single critic of the war has been willing or able to challenge).
Leave a reply