In a recent Fox News interview, Megyn Kelly asked former governor Jeb Bush this question: “On the subject of Iraq, knowing then what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” Bush answered the question by saying that, knowing then what we knew then, he would have.
In other words, he didn’t answer the question. And that’s because the question is a logical absurdity. First, there was no way that we could have known then what we know now. And second, if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, there is no way that we could know now what we know now. That’s because Saddam was playing the very shell game that proper strategic analysis would predict for someone in his predicament.
The invasion proved necessary to prove that an invasion was unnecessary — a wonderful paradox, but where does it leave us?
Megyn Kelly’s question demonstrates that Americans still don’t understand what went wrong in the run-up to the Iraq War. And it’s crucial to understand what happened, because we’re about to walk into the same trap with Iran’s nuclear program, just as some of us predicted a decade ago.
Even if the pre-war intelligence on Iraq hadn’t been wrong, the CIA still wouldn’t have been able to certify that Saddam had no WMD. That’s because we weren’t occupying Iraq, Saddam wasn’t being transparent, and the U.N. inspectors just couldn’t figure out what was going on with his weapons programs. Intelligence gathered from afar is fragmentary and inferential. The most that the CIA could have said was, “Mr. President, we don’t know if Saddam has WMD or not, but it looks bad.”
So if there had been no failure of pre-war intelligence, what situation would the Bush administration have been in? Exactly the same situation it actually found itself in, with one exception: Without being able to base its case for Saddam’s continuing “material breach” of disarmament obligations on fragmentary intel about existing WMD stocks, it would have been more difficult to build support for the war. But at least we might have gone to war, if at all, for the right reasons.
The failure of pre-war intelligence proved consequential only because it led to a failure of diplomacy and communication strategy by the Bush administration, which let the case for war slide onto untenable ground. The real reason it was necessary to consider war against Iraq was that, given Saddam’s history of support for terrorism, developing and using WMD, invading neighbors, and incorrigible criminality and hostility, the United States could not tolerate the uncertainty he posed, particularly after the attacks of 9/11 brought home just how dangerous uncertainty could be. If Saddam couldn’t prove that he didn’t have WMD, we had to consider military action.
In coming months, pay close attention to the “dispute resolution” mechanism that the Iran nuclear deal is supposed to contain in case of a dispute over Iran’s compliance.
That was a hard case to make. And it became an impossible case to make because, during the negotiations at the U.N. Security Council over the text of what would become Resolution 1441, American diplomats failed to accomplish the one thing they needed to accomplish: to place the burden of proof squarely on Saddam. Resolution 1441 was a disaster because it didn’t establish any consequence for the most likely result of U.N. inspections, namely that the inspectors were going to come back with an inconclusive assessment and ask for more time. At that point, the inconclusive inspections would have hardened into a shield for Saddam, just as they have become for Iran’s nuclear program.
The administration was thus lured by the “false” intelligence into making a case for war based on claims about specific WMD stocks in Iraq. In so doing, it accepted a burden of proof that should have been on Saddam, and lost sight of the real reasons we were considering military action. And when the intel was disproven by our own occupying forces, the administration’s new case unraveled.
This matters not just because Republican candidates who still would have supported going to war against Saddam (particularly those related to George W. Bush) can expect the silly question about “if you knew then what we know now.” It matters even more because the U.S. is about to make the same mistake again with Iran’s nuclear program.
In coming months, pay close attention to the “dispute resolution” mechanism that the Iran nuclear deal is supposed to contain in case of a dispute over Iran’s compliance. President Obama has said that the sanctions will snap back if Iran doesn’t comply with the deal: “Our main concern here is making sure that if Iran doesn’t abide by its agreement that we don’t have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops in order to reinstate sanctions.”
This is the single most important open issue that remains in the Iran nuclear negotiation. It is absolutely vital that that any U.N. Security Council resolution lifting the U.N.’s own sanctions contain a provision to the effect that the burden of proof is on Iran and that if there is a dispute over Iran’s compliance that is not resolved quickly and fully, the sanctions snap back automatically and the breach will be considered a threat to the peace.
If the U.S. has to carry the burden of proof on Iran’s compliance, Obama’s nuclear deal will fail in its central objective of peacefully preventing an Iranian nuclear breakout, just as surely as the U.N. inspections failed to prevent the Iraq War.