Worst Thinking Ever: Decision Points and WMD

There were state sponsors of terror. There were sworn enemies of America. There were hostile governments that threatened their neighbors. There were nations that violated international demands. There were dictators who repressed their people. And there were regimes that pursued WMD. Iraq combined all these threats. … Before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage. Through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed. I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with cutters. I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists.

Decision Points, pgs.228-229
George W. Bush

I'm not sure if I've addressed this before. I must have, but it bears repeating. This is because the former president's justification for the war in Iraq is so riddled through with bad thinking that he may as well have just said "Because I could." At least that makes more sense than the WMD canard.

I mistakenly supported the war. I thought it much better to take out Saddam (which was going to have to be done sooner or later) while he was bottled up and under sanctions than it would be after those sanctions were lifted and the Ba'athists went on an arms shopping spree.

I also never thought that the United States would have gone in with such a light force. The Bush administration used fewer than half of the forces to take remove Saddam from power that his father did just to evacuate him from Kuwait. That was maniacal, and I never would have supported that.

Nor did I pay adequate heed to the American pledge to "bring democracy" to Iraq because I thought it was a cynical fantasy. It has long been known that the Sunnis and the Shia despise one another. It only stands to reason that the freedom they would enjoy the most would be the freedom to murder one another ... With 135,000 U.S soldiers caught in the middle. Part of my support was predicated on the idea that the United States would do what it usually does: install a military dictator that wasn't as bad as Saddam, declare the Iraqi people "free" and go home. That was the only option that made any sense, then as now.

But I never, never relied on the WMD argument, and I didn't do that for one reason - it was friggin' silly.

Like everyone else - including, as it happens - the Iraqi military, I believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. I just didn't care because it was immaterial to the geopolitical challenge Saddam posed.

Countries posses WMD for defensive purposes, as a deterrent. Their existence allows forces to further their own objectives while minimizing the risk of direct retribution. For example, you would be very unlikely to invade my cities if you knew that I had, say, mustard gas or nerve agent that I would use on your troops.

Saddam had previously used WMD, but only on his own people and during the war with Iran. It was well known that he possessed such weapons in 1991, but didn't use them to resist the Coalition liberation of Kuwait. Why then would he have passed them onto terrorist groups, unprovoked, after 9/11?

The answer is that he wouldn't have. In fact, much too much was made of Saddam's support of terror in the first place. It did exist, yes, but Iraq did not sponsor terror to the extent that Iran did. For the most part, he provided safe haven after the fact and offered token financial compensation to the families of suicide bombers in the Palestinian Authority. He rarely, if ever, directed terrorist attacks abroad and certainly not against the United States.

It is eminently logical that Saddam might have passed along WMD to terrorists, but only in the face of a certain invasion with the stated purpose of deposing him from power. A retaliatory strike from beyond the grave, as it were. It's far more consistent with Saddam's history and previous behaviour than just throwing weapons around willy-nilly to bearded psychopaths that hated him almost as much as they hate the United States, which there was no precedent for whatsoever.

In using WMD as the main predicate for Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush might well have caused that which he most sought to avoid: a terrorist WMD attack on the United States that could have cost hundreds or thousands of lives. That's an almost inescapable conclusion.

Never before has a president been so lucky that he was so terribly wrong. It's an odd thing to write a celebratory book about, though.


Imperially stolen from FrumForum.