a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Thursday, June 12, 2003 Weapons of Mass whatever 2A pair of good arguments against people (like me) now singing in the “Bush lied” chorus can be found at Sullivan's site (ignore the Hillary post and scroll down) and Instapundit. I find them pretty weak. Instapundit dismisses the criticisms as "conspiracy theories," which they are not. He wonders if Bush's critics would rather see Saddam still in power. And he points out -- correctly -- that Saddam should not have resisted all those U.N. resolutions if he wanted to avoid a war. I agree with that last point: Legally, bureaucratically, Saddam earned himself an invasion. And of course I don't wish he were still in power. Everyone agrees he would have been a threat sometime, and not just to his own people. The criticism mounting now is about the U.S. military build-up: Was the White House honest, or not?This article (via Sullivan) gives a pretty good idea of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons program just before the invasion. Probably skeletal. Most of the actual poison was probably not there anymore. But the scientists and the infrastructure were in place to start things up again, quickly, whenever the U.N. chose to lift sanctions. "What the story shows," writes Sullivan, "is what we always knew: the issue was always the regime, not the weapons." True enough. But what the story also shows is that Washington hawks exaggerated the weapons threat in order to push through a war through on their own timetable. They lied, in other words. And if lying earns you the mistrust of the world or dark suspicions that you went to war for oil and not world peace, you damn well deseve it. Lying is also bad diplomacy. Most of us at Radio Free Mike were reluctant hawks before the invasion, and all of us are glad to see the back of Saddam. But we think the other hawks need to be humbler and less frivolous about this WMD issue. It was the stated reason for the war. The Radio Free Mike position may have been swayed too much by a propagandist named Laurie Mylroie, and other hawks need to admit that they may have exaggerated the weapons threat right along with the White House. History's answer to, "Why did we invade when we did?" will most likely be "Because the president wanted to" and not, "Because Saddam would have been a threat in the near future. " And by the way: Saddam's evil nature doesn't wash as an automatic argument in favor of war. That's just goal-post moving. Evil is an easy argument to trot out now that the risks of war are over and most of our boys are safe. It's also a red herring: No one I take seriously believes Saddam was not an obstacle to peace. (The Saudis are, too.) The people I take seriously are proud of their democratic institutions and don't cotton to lies from their leaders, which is what the Bush defenders are missing -- the damage this kind of exaggeration will do, not just to our democracy but to our credibility as a (terrifyingly powerful) world power. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:37 AM | |
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