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From
the June 30, 2003, issue of National Review
Missing
Logic
WMDgate?
By NR
Editors
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he most vociferous
critics of the president appear to be in the grip of a fairly obvious
logical fallacy: Since we have not yet found weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) in Iraq they must not have existed and the administration is guilty
of having invented a bogeyman.
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In truth, we had
every reason to think that the Iraqi regime had such weapons. The regime
itself admitted that it had produced anthrax and VX. In his January 27
report to the Security Council, Hans Blix said that there was "strong
evidence" that Iraq had produced more anthrax than it had said, and
suggested that it had higher-quality VX, too. We know that the regime
used chemical weapons before. The Clinton administration believed that
the regime was working to expand its WMD capabilities. The Bush administration's
Democratic critics generally did not dispute this point before the war.
Indeed, one of the antiwar arguments was that a military campaign would
expose our troops to WMD. The hawks may have overestimated the dangers
of inaction; the doves clearly overestimated the dangers of action. Prudence
demanded that we assume, in the face of the regime's failure to account
for its weapons, that it still had them.
Some of the evidence
now used to indict the administration is suspect. Deputy defense secretary
Paul Wolfowitz's words to Vanity Fair have been twisted to suggest
that the administration seized on the WMD issue "for bureaucratic
reasons" but really had other motives for the war, such as gaining
the ability to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia. All Wolfowitz really
said was that there were several reasons to overthrow the Iraqi regime,
of which its WMD program was the most broadly compelling.
Iraq covers a lot
of territory, and Saddam was (is?) wily: For the same reasons we figured
that the inspectors would never find his weapons, we should not be shocked
that we have not found them yet. The president's counsel of patience should
be heeded.
But if opponents
of the war are overreaching, it must be said that supporters have made
mistakes of their own. A frustrated president said that we had "found"
WMD when we had only found mobile labs that could be used to develop them.
Some hawks have even denied the importance of WMD as a reason for the
war. They have spoken as though the discovery of mass graves and other
evidence of Baathist cruelty were all the justification the war needed.
A reduction in the amount of evil in the world is of course an accomplishment
worth celebrating. But we did not go to war in a humanitarian enterprise.
That does not mean
that the weapons of mass destruction were the only reason for regime change.
National Review has supported regime change since Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was "merely" a regional
threat. The strategic case for the war also included the upside potential
of establishing a liberal beachhead in the Arab world. But the WMD program
was the decisive argument in the pre-war debate, the trump card that supporters
of the war, including us, used to establish the urgency of regime change.
Many of us argued not only that it was prudent to assume Iraq had the
weapons, but also — on the basis of administration reports —
that it definitely had them. If the weapons are not found or accounted
for, American credibility will suffer a heavy blow: and it will be harder
to trust intelligence reports about North Korean or Iranian threats. Allies
who relied on our information will be chastened, or worse.
Many of Bush's defenders
have argued that the Iraqi regime must have had WMD: Why else would it
have kicked out the inspectors in 1998? That's an excellent point. But
asking it is not a substitute for finding the weapons — and for redressing,
with sobriety rather than reckless partisanship, the possible intelligence
failures that have brought us here.
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