Were we wrong about Iraq?Anyone who supported the U.S.-led invasion last year is bound to be having second thoughts. The main rationale for the war was the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons have been found. The man who was chief U.S. weapons hunter, David Kay, says he does not believe they exist.
While there were many other good reasons for overthrowing Mr. Hussein -- his record of aggression, his vicious repression of the Iraqi people, his repeated defiance of the United Nations and international law -- none of those in itself would have justified an unprovoked attack. The central pillar of the war argument was the weapons. That pillar has crumbled into dust. So was it was a mistake to go to war?
Like many others, I've been wrestling that question. It is not good enough to say, as U.S. President George Bush has, that the world is a safer, better place without Mr. Hussein. That is the same line the police take when they lock up known criminals for crimes they did not commit. It may be true, and the world is certainly a better place without Mr. Hussein, but it does not make a wrongful conviction right. And on the charge of possessing weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Hussein appears to have been wrongfully convicted.
But whose fault is that in the end? By developing WMD before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and hiding them afterward, Mr. Hussein showed he could not be trusted. His constant attempts to conceal his facilities from international weapons inspectors, and his decision to stop co-operating with them altogether in 1998, confirmed his reputation. Given all his cheating over the years, the onus was on him to show that he had abandoned his weapons programs.
For reasons that are still mysterious, he refused. Even after he allowed weapons inspectors back into Iraq in 2002, his regime failed to co-operate properly with them or account for missing weapons stocks. As a result, everyone quite reasonably assumed his guilt. In October of 2002, the National Intelligence Council, the Vatican of the U.S. spy community, concluded that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons" and "if left unchecked, it will probably have nuclear weapons during this decade." The Israeli, Russian, Chinese, German and British intelligence services came to similar conclusions. Even French President Jacques Chirac, the leading European opponent of the war, said that the "probable possession" of WMD by an "uncontrollable country" such as Iraq was a problem. So the blame for the war lies with Mr. Hussein, who might have saved himself by coming clean but would not, and paid the price.
That does not mean U.S. and British hands are completely clean. It is true that Mr. Kay's comments since his resignation as weapons hunter clear the Bush administration of lying to the public about Iraq's weapons. If the threat was exaggerated, he says, it was faulty intelligence, not mendacious politicians, that was to blame. At the same time, it is pretty clear that Mr. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other war supporters picked the juiciest bits of the intelligence in order to make their case. If they didn't lie, they spun and embellished, and that was wrong.
But the thrust of the intelligence at the time fully supported Washington's contention that the Hussein regime represented a "gathering [it never said imminent] threat" to U.S. and international security. Here was a man who had started two wars against his neighbours, had gassed his own population, had thumbed his nose at 17 UN resolutions, had played host to known terrorists. The available evidence showed that, on top of all that, he had, or was trying to obtain, WMD. It was only prudent for the United States and its allies to act.
Imagine what might have happened if they hadn't. If Washington had backed down, Mr. Hussein would have scored an enormous victory. The economic sanctions against his regime, already crumbling, would surely have fallen apart. Emboldened and enriched, he would have been free to resume work unhindered on the weapons that he had sought so eagerly for so long. That is to say nothing of the Iraqi people, who would still be suffering under his tyranny, which was even worse than imagined. The Americans may not have found WMD in Iraq, but they have found scores of mass graves that testify to Mr. Hussein's cruelty.
So: Yes, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were wrong about Iraq's weapons. They should admit it and deal with it, giving full co-operation to the inquiries that have been initiated on both sides of the Atlantic. But Saddam Hussein richly deserved his fate. He brought it on himself.
