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04/27/2003 Archived Entry: "wmd ruse"

WMDs A RUSE?: Over at his blog TheAgitator.com, Radley Balko has been giving some play to this ABC News story.

Essentially, this report argues that the main reason the United States went to war against Iraq was not weapons of mass destruction but to send a message throughout the Middle East. WMDs were emphasized to gain public support and legal justification for the war. This sounds somewhat similar to the argument Josha Micah Marshall made against neoconservative warhawks in the Washington Monthly not that long ago.

Given the rationale behind my "squishiness" on the Iraq war, I obviously would not have found "message-sending" to be an adequate reason for going to war. I myself had wanted stronger evidence of a concrete threat from Saddam's regime. Balko, one of the more thoughtful Iraq doves, views this report as something approaching vindication of his position. But I don't think this report supports his contention that we were "lied into war."

This report does not state that the WMDs were a ruse. It merely states that they were not the sole war aim. If the Bush administration did in fact believe (a) that Iraq had WMDs and (b) that they were inclined to threaten us with them in some fashion, then the war was not waged on false premises. Anytime an administration argues for a policy that it supports for multiple reasons it is going to emphasize the reasons that it thinks will win the most public support. This is only dishonest if the justification used is fabricated; if it is just a question of emphasis, as this report suggests, then you may not like it, but it isn't the same as lying the country into war.

It is also the case that the Bush administration and the intellectuals who have supported it have always to some extent argued that regime change in Iraq would have positive benefits in itself. These benefits were said to include increasing the freedom of the Iraqi people and making Iraq an example that democracy can work in the Middle East. I am very skeptical of this argument, but it is certainly one that was made before and during the war.

Finally, nobody else to my knowledge has picked up this story and nobody has gone on record making these claims. So the report may not be accurate on its own terms.

I do think our credibility will be hurt if we don't ever find any WMDs. But I think declaring that rationale for the war to be a ruse based on flimsy evidence is premature.

Replies: 1 Comment

I quite agree with you that American credibility will be damaged especially since the U.S. hinted so long that it had incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had WMDs.

At the same time, I always figured that WMDs were the pretext. Yes, they expect to find WMDs, assuming they aren't all in Syria, but that was merely the ticket to get into the wider party, to reshape the Middle East.

Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 04/28/2003 12:27 AM EST