Much is being made of the claims based on forged evidence cited in George Bush’s State of the Union speech. Although the documents supporting the story that Iraq tried to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger were known to be false before the invasion, the story is only now becoming a scandal. At issue are the specific, public claims about weapons of mass destruction and WMD programs; although the White House retracted the claim (and then partially retracted their retraction within the week), they insist that there is plenty of other intelligence which showed Iraq had WMDs. But as of yet, no one has been able to find any. So, don’t be fooled; setting aside partisan quibbling for a moment, the real issue is whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq at the time of the invasion.
The administration and its supporters are confident those weapons will be found–eventually–and are hoping this story will fade away in time as we focus on rebuilding Iraq. Many skeptics of the war have been holding up the lack of recovered WMDs as an indication that the White House presented a false pretext for the invasion based on fraudulent evidence. Certainly, the lack of weapons evidence has given credibility to the U.N. inspections team report that Iraq had been, albeit grudgingly, cooperating with U.N. Resolution 1441. More damningly, almost all of the specific evidence offered by the administration and its allies has been shown to be fabricated, or otherwise disproven. The credibility of the administration’s claim appears to weaken with every bogus find, every acknowledgement of falsified evidence. However, we have no way of knowing how much of the intelligence supporting the idea that Iraq had WMDs remains classified; we don’t know how much of it was ultimately accurate.
Having studied Iraq as a political science student in university, I have always had a nagging suspicion that Iraq had maintained at least some of their stocks of WMDs. I mean, why would you give up powerful weapons if you had them? WMDs are a cheap, easily obtainable and efficient alternative to nuclear weapons. The US military is unlikely to destroy its own stores of anthrax, for example, even when it became clear that someone with access to those spores had been mailing them to Congresspeople and various media outlets. On the other hand, the UN inspections failed to turn up any evidence of WMDs; in 1996, defector Hussein Kamel (Saddam’s son-in-law) said that Iraq had destroyed its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons after the Gulf War, in accordance with the UN ban. Even the radio exchange cited by Colin Powell in his speech before the UN makes it seem that Iraq was more concerned about the possibility of WMD remnants from before the ban than trying to cover up a comprehensive illegal weapons program of the type described.
As the Bush administration built up the case for war, analysts both in the intelligence community and academia repeatedly stated that Iraq was not an immediate threat to the United States. The only likely scenario under which Iraq could have used WMDs, according to many experts, was if the army were engaged in full-scale combat. That’s the point of WMDs; they are an equalizer when faced with an overwhelmingly superior opponent. If the military establishment thought that Saddam had WMDs, it knew it was likely that these weapons would be used in the war as a last ditch effort to defend the state. As the National Intelligence Estimate suggests (before the war), the most compelling argument against Iraq’s possession of WMDs is that none of them were used in the resistance to the US invasion…yet.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a May Vanity Fair article, implied that although the record shows the administration repeatedly stated WMDs were the primary reason for war, the issue was chosen for public (and UN) consumption because it had the broadest appeal. The administration, in the face of dwindling evidence for WMDs, has been trying to narrow the issue’s appeal ever since. To quote Wolfowitz on July 22nd, “I’m not concerned about weapons of mass destruction. I’m concerned about getting Iraq on its feet. I didn’t come [to Iraq] on a search for weapons of mass destruction.” If only things were that simple.
WHY IS THE ISSUE OF WMDS IMPORTANT?
Tom Brokaw did a telling interview with President Bush on April 24th 2003, excerpted below.
“Q: Let me ask you about some of the larger policy questions. Before we went to war against Iraq, one of the reasons that you justified this war was that he posed a real threat to the United States. If he couldn’t defend his own country — and we have not yet been able to find the weapons of mass destruction, which were not even launched in defense of Iraq — was that overstated? THE PRESIDENT: No, not at all. As a matter of fact, I think time and investigation will prove a couple of points. One, that he did have terrorist connections. And, secondly, that he had a weapons of mass destruction program — we know he had a weapons of mass destruction program. We now know he’s not going to use them. So we’ve accomplished one objective, and that is that Saddam Hussein will not hurt the United States or friends or our allies with weapons of mass destruction.
Secondly, we are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. We also know there are hundreds and hundreds of sites available for hiding the weapons, which he did effectively for 10 years from the — over 10 years from the United Nations. And that we’ve only looked at about 90 of those sites so far. I mean, literally hundreds of sites.
And so we will find them. But it’s going to take time to find them. And the best way to find them is to continue to collect information from the humans, Iraqis who were involved with hiding them.
Q: As you know, there’s still a lot of skepticism around the world about American motives in Iraq.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q: Why not fold in some of the U.N. inspectors to this effort, not turn it over to them, but make them a part of it? Would that help with the credibility, do you think?
THE PRESIDENT:I think there’s going to be skepticism until people find out there was, in fact, a weapons of mass destruction program.”
My interview credentials are nowhere near as sterling as Tom Brokaw’s, but I know my next question would have been, “what do you mean, ‘dispersed some?’ Wasn’t that the whole point of this war to stop him from doing just that?”
The question now becomes, “where could the weapons have gone?” According to the Army, we have officially run out of places to look for WMDs within Iraq–inspections teams are now covering the same ground twice. If they were not destroyed before the war, they would have to have been well hidden if they were kept from UN inspectors. The only people with access to those WMDs would have to have been government (likely military) officials, many of whom have yet to be captured. The US has had little success pursuing Saddam Hussein himself; they have captured (or killed) less than half of their 54 most wanted government officials to date, of whom about half would likely have had direct knowledge of the extent of WMDs in Iraq at the time of invasion. Just as some of the treasures (less the 33,000 which were looted) of the Iraqi National Museum were hidden by museum staff to preserve them, the chances are good that if there are extant WMDs, they are in the hands of former Ba’athist and military personnel. Or, even more frighteningly, is it possible (though I think somewhat unlikely) that WMDs were looted from government sites, much like the radioactive material which was reported stolen from nuclear sites–cheap dirty bombs, anyone?
We (the public) may never know for sure whether or not Iraq successfully hid any WMDs from the UN inspection team. For argument’s sake, let us put any reservations about fabricated evidence aside for the moment. What if the Bush White House is telling the truth–Saddam had them, and we haven’t found them yet? This leaves us with three possibilities: (a) Weapons of mass destruction are extant within Iraq, in the hands of civilians (b) Weapons of mass destruction are extant outside of Iraq, in the hands of civilians or perhaps the Ba’ath party branch in Syria (c) Weapons of mass destruction were destroyed during the war on Iraq.
It’s just a question of putting two and two together–the administration swears up and down there were WMDs in Iraq, and we can’t find them. The best outcome, and the one which the administration will likely settle on telling the public when the fruitless effort to find evidence is abandoned, is the last option. It seems unlikely, however, that this is the case, because even if the WMDs were destroyed, some debris, some remnant would have been found. If Iraq’s WMD stocks were anything close to what Colin Powell implied in his presentation to the UN, or if Iraq had indeed “reconstituted nuclear weapons,” to quote Donald Rumsfeld, we would have found some trace of them. This indicates to me that if we assume the administration was right, we are left with one or both of the first two options, a chilling idea indeed.
THE MEANING OF “DESTABILIZATION” AND WHY THE WAR WAS DANGEROUSLY STUPID
As we readied for attack, foreign policy experts and academics warned us that attacking Iraq would destabilize the region. Even prominent left-leaning hawk Christopher Hitchens admitted that the plan to destroy Hussein’s regime was “destabilizing, yeah, but that’s what I like about it.” To those outside the academy or political machine, the word “destabilization” is rather ambiguous. Simply put, destabilization is the breakdown of the status quo with uncontrollable effects–exactly what is happening in Iraq right now.
Destabilization is intrinsically vague; as it supplants chaos for order, the effects of destabilization are very difficult to predict beforehand. The only thing one can predict is that in the chaos of war and the aftermath of occupation, systems will break down–systems such as government services and security mechanisms.
Whereas before the destruction of the Iraqi state, you had a means of controlling the alleged WMDs through the state game, because those weapons were under the control of a body with state interests and an instinct for self-preservation. When the Iraqi state was destroyed, we may well have created a terrorist organization that comes ready-made with WMDs (and a vendetta against America), except that now the people with the illegal weapons have been stripped of their state-centered interests. Consequently, we have no means of controlling them through the state game.
Even worse, just because those working at the facilities in question were most likely the ones who carted alleged WMDs away from government sites does not mean that they are necessarily still in possession of those weapons. Given the current economic conditions in Iraq (for example, zoo animals are being stolen for food) and the fact that the aforementioned ex-government members are actively being hunted down, the weapons may have been sold or otherwise escaped the custody of their former custodians. Just as we can expect some of those looted artifacts from the Iraqi National Museum to resurface on the global market, it is entirely likely that any remaining Iraqi WMDs might also surface in the black market for arms (which happen to be the world’s most traded commodity).
THE REBRANDING OF “SODAMN INSANE”
There is a certain misconception, fostered by the media, that Saddam was an irrational, insane warmonger. Certainly, Bush’s speeches, in which he referred to Hussein’s “madness” and so forth reinforce that idea. But, as my professor used to say, “Saddam’s not insane; he’s a gambler.” Hussein was an intelligent, Machiavellian risk-taker who saw that in terms of international relations, might makes right. I suppose “Sodamn Insane” makes a better novelty T-shirt than “Hussein’s a Risk-Taker.” If the case could be made that Iraq’s dictator is not a rational actor, that he cannot be controlled through diplomatic means, then military invasion becomes an acceptable means of dealing with him. The branding of Saddam’s regime as psychopathic was necessary to sell the war.
One of the problems with this characterization is that most of the truly horrendous things (gassing the Kurds, using child soldiers, Stalinesque purges) he did were under American watch and encouragement during the Iran-Iraq war. In a tragically ironic twist, the very same Reagan and Bush I staffers who gave Saddam the WMDs popped up in the Bush II administration to decry their horrendous potential impact in the hands of a madman.
Saddam’s reputation as a crazed sociopath is based, at least in foreign policy terms, on the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, as well as his murderous policy of suppressing Kurdish nationalism. Let’s take a look at the Iran-Iraq war, for example. In 1975, Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers accord, which settled (at least temporarily) border disputes relating to the Shatt-al-Arab the waterway which connects to the Persian Gulf and is Iraq’s only access to the coast. In 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran put Ayatollah Khomeini in power and appeared to jeopardize the veracity of the Algiers accord. Indeed, in September of 1980, Iran began shelling Iraqi border towns. Iraq counterattacked, and this began the Iran-Iraq war, which would continue for eight bloody years. Initially, Saddam told his country, the war would be won in a matter of weeks. Each side underestimated the other and became locked in a war of attrition which saw some of the worst violations of the Geneva convention in the past twenty years: the use of child soldiers, human shields, and finally, chemical weapons. The war ended in a stalemate in 1988; Saddam considered it a success because Iraq hadn’t lost any territory, although it ruined the country’s economy and put it into tremendous debt with the oil-rich sultanates of the Persian Gulf, including Kuwait.
Saddam had always maintained the recidivist claim that Kuwait rightfully belonged to Iraq, based on the fact that the two countries had been united before World War I as a single division of the Ottoman Empire. The British had made Kuwait into a separate protectorate, and Iraq had been grumbling about it ever since. Heavily indebted, Saddam began to mount a series of false claims against Kuwait in May 1990, alleging (among other things) that Kuwait was keeping the price of oil low to damage the Iraqi economy, that Kuwait had illegally extracted oil from southern Iraqi oil fields, and that Kuwaiti troops had been advancing on the Iraqi border. Saddam played a four-month game of pretend diplomacy with Kuwait for the benefit of their fellow Arab League members, calling several conferences with Kuwaiti officials. On July 26th, he summoned U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie, who stated that the U.S. had little interest in disputes between Arab countries, but that they were concerned about his statements regarding Kuwait. Saddam felt this was sufficient evidence that the U.S. would let him invade, and Iraq invaded on August 2nd, 1990.
If there is a distinguishing characteristic of the Hussein regime (besides standard-issue totalitarian ruthlessness), it is that it never repudiated the right to add territory by conquest, as the U.N. charter demands of its members. I am not suggesting that Saddam is a nice guy, that he didn’t murder untold Iraqis and Kurds, that he didn’t use child soldiers during his ill-fated war with Iran, or that he was anything but a brutal dictator. Of course, Rumsfeld knew all that when he was personally delivering WMDs and satellite images of Iranian troop movements to Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war. In fact, Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad as a special envoy from the United States on the very day news of the chemical attack on Iranian troops became public: March 24th, 1984.
In reviewing both the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait, what becomes clear is that Saddam was a much better politician than he was a military planner…a fault he shares with his nemeses in the Bush White House. Both of Saddam’s military exploits ended disastrously, principally because Saddam’s mouth seems to run ahead of his tanks. While Iraq’s military strength was considerable during the 1980s (Iraq had skillfully played both sides of the fence during the Cold War, receiving weapons both from capitalist and Communist countries), by 2003 (after a decade of sanctions) the Iraqi army was a shell of its former self.
Saddam’s regime and the Bush White House are actually quite similar in that they seem to be better at the politics of war than military planning. Both the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Iraq’s drawn-out war with Iran seemed to satisfy certain short-term political objectives while dragging the country into a horrible quagmire and protracted military engagement.
CAUSUS BELLI GOES BELLY-UP
My point in this essay is not to declare that Iraq had WMDs; I don’t think we will ever know with absolute certainty. Likewise, my point is not to claim that the Bush White House was not lying when it made specific references to intelligence that weapons exist; numerous examples show that they twisted and ignored good intelligence which claimed Iraq was not a threat to the US.
My point is that we’re caught between a rock and a hard place: if there were no WMDs, then the United States is guilty of violating international law, much in the same way Iraq was when it invaded Kuwait. If the administration and its defenders are correct, then they have made their prophecy of Iraqi WMDs ending up in the hands of terrorists self-fulfilling, which was not a likely scenario before the fall of the Iraqi state. In a poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup, 56% of Americans said they believed the war was justified, even if there were no WMDs in Iraq. My position is the converse; the war was unjustified (and a critical strategic misstep), even if there were WMDs in Iraq. Furthermore, it is the politicized nature of the Bush White House which allows them to be so callous with regard to human lives lost in the invasion (on both sides) and construct a murderous rhetoric which will enable them to invade any country as part of the “war on terror.”
It’s fairly obvious that in order to garner support for the invasion of Iraq, the Bush white House needed to place their military adventure within the context of the “War on Terror,” a fact which was not lost on military advisers like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who saw the opportunity to do so immediately after September 11th.
Ultimately, we cannot abide the dumbing down of foreign policy. It is a terrible abuse of democracy to rely on a misinformed public who cannot understand the full implications of the Bush White House’s reckless incompetence. As the search for WMDs continues to disappoint the administration, we see that their rhetoric has squeezed them between a rock and a hard place. The more the administration insists that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the more we must hold them accountable for the implications of that statement.
