Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom Foundation on Are We Feeling Duped Yet?
A lot of silly things have been said about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, such as that Saddam Hussein could be ready to launch in 45 minutes. But perhaps the silliest of all is the Republicans’ charge that even to ask whether the Bush administration misled the American people is to engage in partisan politics.
Note the double standard. It’s politics to point out that a couple of months after the Hussein regime fell no unconventional weapons have been found. But to even wonder whether the war was politically motivated is beyond the pale. “How dare you suggest that a president of the United States would put American troops in harm’s way for political reasons?”
How dare us indeed? I mean, to demand that the government tell the truth about people it sent to die halfway around the world is just downright awful of us! I can't think of a more inappropriate question for us to ask. We should all just shut up and do as we're told.
The faux naivet‚ is precious. Presidents have been waging politically motivated wars almost since the country was founded. Attempting to separate war from politics is futile. As Karl von Clausewitz famously said, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
War is the health of the state, but it ain't so healthy for those doing the dying.
The president’s apologists don’t have a glimmer of how ridiculous they sound. For example, they say Bush’s critics are inconsistent because, while they wanted the UN weapons inspectors to have more time, they think the U.S. teams should have come up with something by now. But this glosses over some important facts. The UN inspectors did not have the benefit of the touted U.S. intelligence that supposedly would have led them to the weapons. The U.S. teams have that information, as well as full run of the country and the ability to take Iraqis into custody and interrogate them. It is proper for our expectations about the U.S. search to be higher.
Burden of proof baby. The minute Baghdad collapsed the "weapons of mass destruction" argument was over. If there was any time that Hussein was going to use such weapons, the war in Iraq would have been that time. The fact that he didn't use them disproves the chickenhawk rantings about their immediate threat to the United States. What was he waiting for? Are we really supposed to believe that these weapons were threatening the U.S., yet the madman who had them wouldn't use them in a last ditch attempt to preserve his grip on power? Is this the logic the pro-war folks want us to swallow?
Hell, the only exposure that U.S. troops have had to chemical or biological weapons since Vietnam was the last Gulf War, when the U.S. Army blew up a chemical weapons cache at Khamisiyah, exposing the entire ground deployment force to sarin. Of course, you won't read about that in your typical Adminstration pimping commentary or apologist weblog.
This entry also posted at Stand Down.
“If there was any time that Hussein was going to use such weapons, the war in Iraq would have been that time. The fact that he didn’t use them disproves the chickenhawk rantings about their immediate threat to the United States. What was he waiting for? Are we really supposed to believe that these weapons were threatening the U.S., yet the madman who had them wouldn’t use them in a last ditch attempt to preserve his grip on power? Is this the logic the pro-war folks want us to swallow?”
Well written, this part especially, but the whole commentary is well written.
Posted by AB on July 10, 2003 10:01 PM
Perhaps the most dangerous line of thinking used by the pro-war lobby is the implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) held belief: ‘well so what if Saddam didn’t actually have WMD? He was a bad man wasn’t he? Isn’t it right that we take action against such people?’. This line of thinking is incredibly dangerous, but what is essentially being said is that ‘the ends justify the means’. Assuming it is true that the Iraqis are better off now than they were, the argument is that it was therefore justifiable to lie to the American (and British) people as ‘it was in a good cause’. The problem is, where do you stop? If it is now okay to lie to the people who elected you(or, in Bush’s case, didn’t elect you), then presumably it is okay to lie about the lie, and lie about how the ‘peace keeping’ mission in Iraq is going, and lie about further war plans, and so on. Pro-war thinkers should take a long, hard look at the history of Soviet Russia, a state that was setup on the principles that any and all moral principles could be set in the pursuit of ‘desirable’ ends.
Posted by Brendan on July 11, 2003 04:54 AM
One further point about the failure to discover WMD’s is worth making, I think. Part of the justification for going to war, and not proceeding with inspections and other forms of international policing, was that Saddam could not be deterred from developing WMD’s. But the evidence now is that he was being deterred by the international pressure on him. This is shown in two ways. First, there are no such weapons or the means of eveloping them. Second, Iraquis in a position to know say that the weapons program was dropped just because of international pressure. The BBC reports today that a senior Iraqui scientist who formerly worked on producing mustard gas has “said that the stocks were later destroyed and the development programmes scrapped as the then Iraqi regime decided that the political cost of being caught was too high.” See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3049894.stm
Thus, the asserted need to go it alone, and to go it alone immediately, simply did not exist.
Posted by david l on July 11, 2003 10:12 AM
Then why did Saddam dick around the UN inspectors the way he did? As opposed to the way several other nations handled this issue?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030123-1.html
Posted by Yehudit on July 12, 2003 06:57 PM
Yehudit asked why Saddam Hussein jerked around the UN inspectors the way he did if there were no weapons.
Maybe so he could look as if he had them? Dictators of that stripe have to project power or fall in a particularly quick and nasty way…
I wondered right up until troops crossed the ‘red line’ if it might really be true that the Iraqi govt had and would use chem weapons. I was pretty sure the nuke stuff was bogus overhyped threat. From early April on, I was completely sure we’d been lied to from the beginning.
At no point, starting in October 2001 when the first signs of this invasion appeared, did I honestly believe this administration organized this push to war for any reason having to do with disarmament.
Posted by Nell Lancaster on July 12, 2003 07:22 PM
Another possibility is that the Iraqis don’t have the most efficienct bureaucracy in the world, and were telling the truth when they said some records had been lost or not kept in the first place.
Posted by David Tomlin on July 12, 2003 10:25 PM
Who ever said that :”Saddam dicked around the UN inspectors’ ?
Oh yeah that was the same pro-war group again, to which you belong Yehudit.
And we all now know how trustworthy you guys are.
How come you now want us to provide an explanation to a postulate that you errornously introduced to coverup another lie that was already exposed as a lie well before you made this untruth fashionable ?
Now it only confirms the existance of your scheme of deceit rather proving its non-existance.
I thought you were smarter than that Yehudit.
Wouter
Posted by Wouter on July 14, 2003 09:09 AM
Wouter, at least I know how to construct a coherent English sentence.
Posted by Yehudit on July 19, 2003 12:49 PM