The Right War for the Right Reasons
KAGAN, ROBERT & KRISTOL, WILLIAM
The Right War for the Right Reasons The liberation of Iraq was abundantly justified. BY ROBERT KAGAN & WILLIAM KRISTOL With all the turmoil surrounding David Kay's comments on the failure to find...
...This past week, moreover, another U.S...
...The Bush campaign didn't talk about it because Bush was running a campaign, ironic in retrospect, which promised a less active, more restrained American role in the world...
...Butler's report concluded that, in addition, "it needs to be recognized that Iraq possesses an industrial capacity and knowledge base, through which biological warfare agents could be produced quickly and in volume, if the Government of Iraq decided to do so...
...Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N...
...During the first four years of inspections, Butler noted, the inspectors "had been very substantially misled by Iraq both in terms of its understanding of Iraq's proscribed weapons programs and the continuation of prohibited activities, even under the [U.N.'s] monitoring...
...V Did the administration claim the Iraqi threat was imminent, in the sense that Iraq possessed weapons that were about to be used against the United States...
...But we can hardly see how it benefits the people of the United States or the world to declare it over prematurely...
...There were some 6,000 aerial bombs filled with chemical agent that were unaccounted for...
...The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam's secrets...
...Was World War I a war of necessity...
...and so the war to remove Saddam was, in the broad strategic sense, in the sense relevant to serious international politics, necessary...
...It was President Clinton who, in February 1998, posed the critical question: "What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction...
...And they must have been having some success, for as they drew closer to uncovering what the Iraqis were hiding, Saddam grew less and less cooperative and began to block their access to certain facilities...
...intelligence analysts predicted it would be extremely difficult to find weapons of mass destruction in the aftermath of an invasion...
...The moral case for war was linked to strategic considerations related to the peace and security of the Middle East...
...As Richard Butler and other weapons inspectors have argued, this task proved all but impossible once it became clear that Saddam was determined to acquire such weapons at some point...
...It is important to recall that the primary purpose of Security Council Resolution 1441, passed on November 8, 2002, was not to discover whether Saddam had weapons and programs...
...Kay, oddly, has himself suggested in one press interview that the stockpiles or some portion of them may have been transferred to Syria before the war...
...So if the world had known in February 2003 what Kay says we know now—that there were no large stockpiles of weapons, but that Iraq continued to pursue weapons of mass destruction programs and to deceive and conceal these efforts from the U.N...
...It was an obstacle to progress in the Middle East and the Arab world...
...Its effect was to make many both inside and outside the administration take a closer look at international threats, because it was clear that all of us had been too sanguine about such threats prior to September 11...
...Had the world discovered unambiguously in February 2003 that Saddam was cheating on its commitments in Resolution 1441, surely even the French would have found it difficult to block a U.N...
...For this reason, Berger continued, the Clinton administration had concluded it would be necessary at some point to move beyond containment to regime change...
...And in fact, containment was probably not "sustainable over the long run...
...It is also becoming clear that the battle of Iraq has been an important victory in the broader war in which we are engaged, a war against terror, against weapons proliferation, and for a new Middle East...
...inspectors frequently opened treasure troves of information simply with the discovery of a single document in a mountain of paper...
...In our view—and Robert Kagan a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...He spent tens of billions of dollars on weapons, both conventional and unconventional...
...But is the ambiguity truly "unresolvable," or was it just unresolvable within the limited time of Kay's investigation...
...Most of the arguments against the war concerned timing...
...In his May 30, 2003, report to the Security Council, Hans Blix reported that the declared stocks of anthrax and VX remained unaccounted for...
...It is also possible we will find stockpiles of weapons, or evidence of their destruction or removal just before the war...
...then, when that falsehood was exposed, they denied weaponiz-ing their biological weapons agents...
...Was the Spanish-American War a war of necessity...
...About a week after Berger gave his speech warning of the limitations of containment, the Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day missile and bombing strike on Iraq aimed at destroying as much of Saddam's weapons capabilities as possible...
...weapons inspectors had written one alarming report after another about Saddam's current and potential weapons capabilities...
...VI On Meet the prress on February 8, Tim Russert asked the president whether the war in Iraq was "a war of choice or a war of necessity...
...Together, this pattern of behavior made the removal of Saddam desirable and necessary, in the judgment of both the Clinton and Bush administrations...
...Would they hesitate to use them...
...But that was not because anyone believed it had ceased to be an urgent and growing problem...
...Many argued that Saddam could be (indeed, was) contained in Kuwait, and that he could eventually have been forced to retreat by economic sanctions...
...Over the course of 1998, the U.N...
...After 1995, when the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and chief organizer of the weapons programs, Hussein Kamal, produced a wealth of new information about Iraqi weapons programs and stockpiles—information the Iraqis were forced to acknowledge was accu-rate—the U.N...
...In addition, according to Kay's October report and his most recent testimony, Iraqi officials undertook a massive effort to destroy evidence, burning documents and destroying computer hard-drives...
...Kay does not believe so...
...This kind of equipment was explicitly mentioned in Hans Blix's requests for information, but was instead concealed from Blix throughout his investigations...
...President Clinton declared in early 1998 that Saddam was clearly attempting "to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them...
...This produces, Kay suggests, "a level of unre-solvable ambiguity" about Saddam's weapons programs...
...If that were true, then it would not be the case, pace Kay, that "we were all wrong...
...As for those neighbors, the threat of Saddam's aggression, which hung over the region for more than two decades, has finally been eliminated...
...September 11 had added new dimensions to the danger...
...we couldn't do it as long as Saddam was in power...
...Such a rationale is not "merely" moral...
...By the end of 1997, the N^^ Yo-rk Tonnes reported, the U.N...
...It was "a costly policy, in economic and strategic terms...
...In the 1990s, U.N...
...But we do not understand why Kay is so confident he knows what happened to those stockpiles, or to other parts of Saddam's weapons programs that have not been found...
...Assuming the United States remains committed to helping establish a democratic government in Iraq, that will be a blessing both to the Iraqi people and to their neighbors...
...This was the logic that had led the Clinton administration to conclude that someday, somehow, the only answer to the problem would be Saddam's removal from power...
...The non-discovery of weapons stockpiles has not changed the contours of that debate...
...There was little doubt that Saddam had them...
...The future of Iraq," Berger argued, "will affect the way in which the Middle East and the Arab world in particular evolve in the next decade and beyond...
...What if it were as clear then as it is now that Saddam was engaged in another round of deceit and concealment...
...But we did note that uncertainty itself was a danger, because it meant that the United States would have difficulty knowing whether or how fast the risk from Saddam was increasing...
...As is so often the case in international affairs, there was no separating the nature of Saddam's rule at home from the kinds of policies he conducted abroad...
...It is rather surprising, given the certainty with which this charge is thrown around, how little the critics have in the way of quotations from administration officials to back it up...
...We understand why some now want to declare the search over...
...Kay acknowledges that stockpiles may, in fact, still be hidden somewhere...
...Again, we are willing to be persuaded that Saddam had no weapons stockpiles last year when the war began...
...weapons inspections team, warned that much was not known about the Iraqi program but that there was ample reason to believe a significant weapons of mass destruction program still existed in Iraq...
...that is committed to peace in the region.'" We made substantially the same argument in a January The danger was not that Iraq would present, in the current popular phrase, an "imminent"threat to the American homeland...
...So there was a lot they wanted to Now, of course, we know that Saddam did not comply with Resolution 1441...
...Our chief concern in 1998, like Berger's, was the threat Saddam posed to regional security and stability, the maintenance of which was in large part the responsibility of the United States...
...Scientific examinations proved that they had...
...And it is simply too soon to tell about the rest...
...The result, Kay acknowledged, is that "we're really not going to be able to prove . . . some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to...
...By the time inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002, Saddam was ready to be a little more forthcoming, because he had rejiggered his program to withstand somewhat greater scrutiny...
...Nor was there any question what Saddam would do if and when containment collapsed...
...The Clinton administration didn't want to talk about it because it felt it had run out of options...
...The Bush administration's approach to Iraq was fundamentally in keeping with that of the Clinton administration, except that after September 11, inaction seemed even less acceptable...
...There was an argument against going to war last year...
...Like President Clinton, Berger did a masterful job of laying out the case for removing Saddam Hussein...
...Given the "terror regime of Saddam," Kay concluded, he and his team learned things after the war "that no U.N...
...Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001...
...And what about the first Gulf War...
...Butler recounted a seven-year history of Iraqi deception and concealment of proscribed weapons and activities...
...But when asked whether people involved in Iraqi weapons programs might now fear prosecution for war crimes, Kay said, "Absolutely...
...But even after Kamal's defection, the Iraqis had continued to conceal programs and mislead the inspectors...
...Saddam was not a "madman...
...Nor do we...
...inspectors believed, Clinton continued, that "Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions . . . and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons...
...The possible nexus between terrorism and Iraq's weapons program made Iraq an even more urgent issue...
...The Iraq Liberation Act chronicled Saddam's use of chemical weapons and declared that Iraq "has persisted in a pattern of deception and concealment regarding the history of its weapons of mass destruction programs...
...Nor did they support the war because they were fundamentally misled by American intelligence about the nature and extent of Saddam's weapons programs...
...But it was not the lesson the United States or the rest of the world wanted him to learn...
...The same question might be asked about the physical searches Kay did not conduct...
...Undoubtedly he hoped that if he could get through that last round, he would be home free, eventually without sanctions or further inspections...
...and for the U.N...
...1998 letter to President Clinton, a letter whose signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Robert Zoellick...
...Most of what they and everyone else knew about those programs we had learned from the U.N...
...After all, it was argued, the likeliest scenario for Saddam's actually using the weapons he had was in the event of an American invasion...
...ment White Paper on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction stated that "in the absence of UNSCOM inspectors, Iraq could restart limited mustard agent production within a few weeks, full-production of sarin within a few months, and pre-Gulf War production levels—including VX— within two or three years...
...The question was whether it was safer to act sooner or later...
...Indeed, it had continued to engage in an elaborate campaign of deception and concealment of weapons activities throughout the time when Hans Blix and the UNMOVIC inspectors were in the country, and right up until the day of the invasion, and beyond...
...Security Council in January 1999 by Richard Butler, head of the U.N...
...As Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said on October 10, 2002, explaining his support for the legislation authorizing the president to go to war, "The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent, but it is real, it is growing and it cannot be ignored...
...He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction...
...BY ROBERT KAGAN & WILLIAM KRISTOL With all the turmoil surrounding David Kay's comments on the failure to find stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, it is time to return to first principles, and to ask the question: Was it right to go to war...
...For as Bush and many others argued, what if Saddam allowed his weapons capabilities to be shared with terrorists...
...Is it possible that when all the scientists feel safe enough to talk, we may learn more...
...But even a contained Saddam" was "harmful to stability and to positive change in the region...
...Its hype was appreciably less than that of Clinton secretary of defense William Cohen, who appeared on national television in late 1997 holding a bag of sugar and noting that the same amount of anthrax "would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C...
...Security Council...
...But we believe that it is already clear—as clear as such things get in the real world—that the price of the liberation of Iraq has been worth it...
...inspectors learned that the Iraqi military stored chemical ordnance at the same ammunition depots where the conventional rounds were stored...
...So long as Saddam remained "in power and in confrontation with the world," Berger argued, Iraq would remain "a source of potential conflict in the region," and perhaps more important, "a source of inspiration for those who equate violence with power and compromise with surrender...
...Nor was it in the least surprising that the issue of Iraq arose immediately...
...Iran has at least gestured toward opening its nuclear program to inspection...
...For Saddam would have been in flagrant violation of yet another set of commitments to disarm...
...It remains possible that new evidence will be found...
...As of October, only 10 of these ammunition depots had been searched by U.S...
...Critics insist mere oppression was not sufficient reason for war, and in any case that it was not Bush's reason...
...Was this concern far-fetched...
...These missiles would have allowed Saddam to threaten targets from Ankara to Cairo...
...Quoting President Clinton, Berger suggested "the best way to address the challenge Iraq poses is 'through a government in Baghdad—a new government— that is committed to represent and respect its people, not repress them...
...He was a predator and an aggressor...
...As Butler repeated time and again in his reports to the Security Council, the whole inspections regime was premised on Saddam's cooperation...
...The uncertainty of the situation would, we argued, "have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East...
...Remember, the vast majority of arguments against the war assumed that he did have these weapons...
...The key question for more than a decade, for both the Clinton and the Bush administrations, was not only what weapons Saddam had but what weapons he was trying to obtain, and how long it might be before containment failed and he was able to obtain them...
...inspectors reported that hundreds of shells filled with mustard agent had been declared "lost" by Iraq and remained unaccounted for...
...In other words, war was necessary to our national interest, if not absolutely necessary to the immediate protection of the homeland...
...The current debate over "imminence" is an ex post facto attempt to relitigate the old argument over the war...
...If this much had been accomplished, if we had succeeded in getting Saddam to scale back his programs in the hope of eventually turning them on again, was that a reason not to go to war...
...inspections in 2002 and 2003 were explicitly ordered not to acknowledge the existence of the prison complex...
...Kay reported, "We have had a number of Iraqis who have come forward and said, 'We did not tell the U.N...
...It now appears that this uncertainty about Iraq's actual capabilities was perhaps what Saddam aimed to achieve...
...we might have gotten none of it...
...If Saddam "does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction," we argued, which eventually he was "almost certain to do if we continue along the present course," American troops in the region, American allies, the stability of the Middle East, and the world's supply of oil would all be put at risk...
...It should certainly have been compelling to those (like us) who supported the war on Slobodan Milosevic a few years ago...
...Security Council...
...Whether the United States could have kept 200,000 troops on a permanent war footing in the Persian Gulf for another six months is even more doubtful...
...Under questioning from the senators, however, Kay admitted a few areas of uncertainty...
...In some sense all of these wars were wars of choice...
...Kay has not said how many were searched in the succeeding four months, but one suspects a great many still have not been examined...
...Saddam expelled the U.N...
...It had nothing to do with whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and WMD programs...
...Those peoples were engaged in a "struggle between two broad visions of the future...
...What Kay discovered in the course of his eight-month-long investigation was that Iraq had failed to answer outstanding questions about its arsenal and programs...
...The last time we restated the case for war in Iraq (in October 2003), we quoted extensively from a speech delivered by President Clinton in February 1998...
...I It is fashionable to sneer at the moral case for liberating an Iraqi people long brutalized by Saddam's rule...
...inspectors in response to the attack, and they did not return until November 2002...
...Already, other terror-implicated regimes in the region that were developing weapons of mass destruction are feeling pressure, and some are beginning to move in the right direction...
...hide because it showed what they were doing was illegal...
...Now, of course, we know more definitively that Saddam did not comply with Resolution 1441...
...But while his weapons were a key part of the case for removing Saddam, that case was always broader...
...We'll address that assertion in a moment...
...Finally there is the question of Iraqi documents...
...inspections...
...Was the Korean War...
...At a Pentagon press briefing on Iraq's WMD, Cohen also noted that if Saddam had "as much VX in storage as the U.N...
...He achieved through brute force total dominance at home, and it was through force and the threat of force that he sought dominance in his region, as well...
...The prospects for war in the region have been substantially diminished by our action...
...inspection team could "no longer verify that Iraq is not making weapons of mass destruction" and specifically could not monitor "equipment that could grow seed stocks of biological agents in a matter of hours...
...The mass graves uncovered since the end of the war are alone sufficient justification for it...
...In the end, Berger explained, containment of Saddam would not be enough...
...Security Council over the course of the dozen years after the end of the Gulf War in 1991, was not primarily to find Saddam's existing stockpiles...
...Security Council by instituting a more streamlined effort, the so-called "smart sanctions...
...The goal of American policy, and indeed of the U.N...
...Libya has given up its weapons of mass destruction program...
...The pattern of the previous years—"Iraqi defiance, followed by force mobilization on our part, followed by Iraqi capitulation"—had left "the international community vulnerable to manipulation by Saddam...
...He had scaled back to a skeletal program, awaiting the moment when he could breathe life back into it...
...Saddam's regime terrorized his own people, but it also posed a threat to the region, and to us...
...But what about the rest of Kay's testimony...
...After all, we had a decade-long history of confrontation with Iraq, we were flying military missions in Iraqi air space, President Clinton had declared Saddam the greatest threat to our security in the 21st century, Clinton officials like Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright had concluded that Saddam must eventually be removed, and U.N...
...Although widely misreported as confirming Kay's claim regarding the stockpiles, in fact the report casts doubt on it...
...But let's remember what that argument was...
...Clinton intelligence officials observed the Iraqis moving equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons out of the range of video cameras that had been installed by U.N...
...weapons inspections process had become an elaborate cat-and-mouse game...
...We are paying a real price in blood and treasure in Iraq...
...And he elaborated: "Little progress was made in the solution of outstanding issues...
...These hypotheses are possible...
...But when viewed in the context of history and international circumstances, they were all based on judgments about the costs of inaction, the benefits of action, and on strategic calculations that action then would be far preferable to action later in less favorable circumstances...
...VII So what about those stockpiles...
...The president paused before responding, asking Russert to elaborate, as if unwilling to accept the dichotomy...
...As Kay reported last October, his survey team uncovered "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the U.N...
...The danger was not, however, that Iraq would present a direct threat to the physical security of the United States or, in the current popular phrase, pose an "imminent" threat to the American homeland...
...A majority of Democratic senators— including, of course, John Kerry and John Edwards—voted for the resolution authorizing the president to use force against Iraq...
...Nor was it surprising that as President Bush began to move toward war with Iraq in the fall and winter of 2002, he mustered substantial support among Democrats as well as Republicans...
...Clinton went on to say about President Bush's actions in the fall of 2002, "So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N...
...Still, there is no question that Saddam's history with and interest in weapons of mass destruction made his threat distinctive...
...How often did the country face immediate peril and destruction unless war was launched...
...Surely this creates another level of ambiguity, which, in time, may be resolved...
...Saddam might be slowed, but he would not be stopped...
...During the 1990s, U.N...
...For all the reasons that Berger had outlined, Saddam's regime itself was the problem, above and beyond his weapons capabilities...
...That judgment was and remains correct...
...Yes, Berger acknowledged, America's "most vital national interest in dealing with Iraq" was to "prevent Saddam from rebuilding his military capability, including weapons of mass destruction, and from using that arsenal to move against his neighbors or his own people...
...True, neither candidate in the 2000 election had talked much about Iraq...
...At stake was "our ability to fight terror, avert regional conflict, promote peace, and protect the security of our friends and allies...
...Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished...
...But it is too soon, we believe, to come firmly to that conclusion...
...Nor do we find particularly persuasive the argument that Saddam was only pretending to have weapons of mass destruction, or that he was delusional and being deceived by all around him...
...His principal method appears to have been interviews with scientists who would have known what was produced and where it might be stored, as well as a search through a portion of the documents uncovered after the war...
...We would have returned to the old pattern of "Iraqi defiance, followed by force mobilization on our part, followed by Iraqi capitulation," followed by a new round of Iraqi defiance—and the wearing down of both the international community and the United States...
...has been driven by denial and deception imperatives is no small task...
...II So the threat of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was related to the overall political and strategic threat his regime posed to the Middle East...
...I suspect regardless of how long they had stayed, that attitude would have been the same...
...This time we quote extensively from another speech, delivered ten months later, in December 1998, by President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger...
...He waged war against Iran throughout the 1980s...
...In this case, we believe that war would have come eventually because of the trajectory that Saddam was on— assuming the United States intended to continue to play its role as guarantor of peace and security in the Middle East...
...inspector would have ever learned" while Saddam was still in power...
...Last month Kay was asked what would have happened if Blix and his team had been allowed to continue their mission...
...No senior official, including Secretary Powell, believed there was any but the smallest chance Saddam would comply with the terms of Resolution 1441...
...Meanwhile, a February 13, 1998, U.S...
...But that did not mean the Iraq issue had gone away, and after September 11, it returned to the fore...
...But how many of our wars have been, strictly speaking, wars of necessity...
...As Kay has testified repeatedly, Iraq was "in clear material violation of 1441...
...We now know, however, that giving Blix a few more months would not have made a difference...
...The other vision fed on discontent and fear...
...First they denied having one...
...IV Some of that intelligence has now turned out to be wrong...
...For the people of Iraq, the war put an end to three decades of terror and suffering...
...The future course of the Middle East and the Arab world were at stake in Iraq...
...According to Kay's testimony before the Senate (and since he has provided no written report and no documentation to support his recent claims, this is all anyone has to go on), Kay and his team "went after this not in the way of trying to find where the weapons are hidden...
...Eventually they were forced to admit that they "had weaponized BW agents and deployed biological weapons for combat use...
...The truth is, neither Kay nor anyone else knows what happened to the weapons stockpiles that we know Iraq once had—because the Iraqis admitted having them...
...The press has focused attention almost entirely on David Kay's assertion that there were no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons when the United States and its allies invaded Iraq last March...
...The real question was whether he was ready to make a clean breast of everything and give up not only his forbidden weapons but also his efforts to acquire them once and for all...
...we did not tell them the truth, we did not show them this equipment, we did not talk about these programs...
...resolution authorizing war...
...That part of Kay's testimony has been widely ignored...
...VIII Whatever the results of that search, it will continue to be the case that the war was worth fighting, and that it was necessary...
...The inspectors intensified their search...
...The strains were found in a scientist's home...
...Plans and advanced design work on new missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers—well beyond the 150-kilometer limit imposed on Iraq by the U.N...
...Critics of the war, and of the Bush administration, have seized on the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq...
...The longer the standoff continued, Berger warned, "the harder it will be to maintain" international support...
...during the inspections that began in late 2002...
...intelligence...
...But Saddam never cooperated, not in the 1990s and not in 2003...
...The threat to the United States was that we would be compelled to defend our allies and our interests in circumstances made much more difficult and dangerous by Saddam's increasingly lethal arsenal...
...But we didn't know...
...Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell was trying to prevent the collapse of the international sanctions regime and to staunch the hemorrhaging of consensus at the U.N...
...He was right...
...Sanctions could not have been maintained...
...In our letter, we argued that The policy of "containment" of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months...
...Administration officials doubted Saddam would do this...
...Never mind Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo...
...In December 2002, according to USA Today, a team of U.S...
...But it predicted that "locating a program that...
...governIt was President Clinton who, in February 1998, posed the critical question: "What if Saddam fails to comply and we fail to act...
...here we disagree with what Paul Wolfowitz said to Vanitty Fair a few months ago—liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam's brutal, totalitarian dictatorship would by itself have been sufficient reason to remove Saddam...
...about what we were hiding, nor would we have told the U.N.,'" because the risks were too great...
...September 11 shocked the nation, and it shocked the president...
...Everyone from Howard Dean to the New York Tines editorial board to Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac assumed that he had both...
...If the United States had pulled back last year, we would have placed ourselves in the trap that Berger had warned about five years earlier...
...His clear and unwavering ambition, an ambition nurtured and acted upon across three decades, was to dominate the Middle East, both economically and militarily, by attempting to acquire the lion's share of the region's oil and by intimidating or destroying anyone who stood in his way...
...The U.N...
...At some point, Saddam may have decided that instead of building up large stockpiles of weapons, the safer thing would be to advance his covert programs for producing weapons but wait until the pressure was off to produce the weapons themselves...
...As Dominique de Villepin acknowledged in the contentious months before the war, "We all realize that success in the inspections presupposes that we get full and complete cooperation from Iraq...
...And it was pretty clear at the time that Saddam was not complying...
...we might have gotten half of it...
...From Iran to Saudi Arabia, liberal forces seem to have been encouraged...
...weapons inspectors...
...As President Clinton recalled in his speech three years later, Kamal had "revealed that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to build many more...
...containment, already dubious, was far less persuasive after September 11...
...Without the inspectors, the task of keeping track of Saddam's programs was well-nigh impossible...
...inspections process collapsed...
...When Kay delivered his interim report in October 2003, he noted that there were approximately 130 ammunition storage areas in Iraq, some of them spanning an area of about 50 square miles, and including some 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs, and other ordnance...
...If so, it was exactly the same far-fetched concern that had preoccupied President Clinton in 1998, when he warned, in his speech on Iraq, about a "rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists," and when he had spoken of an "unholy axis" of international terrorists and outlaw states as one of the greatest threats Americans faced...
...As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons...
...William Kristol is editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The most frequent complaint was that Bush was rushing to war...
...That was why Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs, both what we knew about them and what we did not know about them, gave the situation a special urgency...
...This is of course a legitimate subject of debate—but it would be almost as much so even if large stockpiles of weapons had already been recovered...
...Why not give Blix and his inspectors another three months or six months...
...The "immediate military threat" might be held at bay for the moment...
...It was urgent in 1998, and it was urgent four years later...
...inspectors...
...The U.N...
...Was World War II before the attack on Pearl Harbor, or afterwards with respect to fighting Germany in Europe...
...The failure to find them, and now David Kay's claim that they did not exist at the time of the invasion last year (a claim reported by an astonishing number of journalists as meaning they never existed at all), has led many to maintain that the entire war was fought on false pretenses...
...That is a part of Kay's testimony that has been widely ignored...
...inspectors led by Blix during the time allocated by Resolution 1441—wouldn't there have been at least as much, and probably more, support for the war...
...Finally, there was the famous confrontation over the so-called "presidential palaces"—actually vast complexes of buildings and warehouses that Saddam simply declared off-limits to inspectors...
...about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material...
...The Air Force and intelligence agencies believed the bombing had destroyed or degraded a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities, but they never knew the extent of the damage, because, of course, there were no inspectors left to investigate...
...In the next century," Clinton predicted, "the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now—a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists . . . who travel the world among us unnoticed...
...It continued: "It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime...
...Based on American intelligence, the Clinton administration targeted suspected weapons production facilities throughout Iraq...
...If Kay is right, Saddam had learned a lesson at some point in the 1990s, perhaps after the Kamal defection, perhaps before or after Operation Desert Fox in 1998...
...New research on agents applicable to biological weapons, including Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing research on ricin and aflatoxin—all of which was, again, concealed from Hans Blix despite his specific request for any such information...
...So he figured he would survive, and, as Kay concluded, "They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs...
...government report concerning Iraq's weapons surfaced in the press...
...A report to the U.N...
...In the early months of the administration, Bush officials began to contemplate some increased support for Iraqi opposition forces, pursuant to legislation passed overwhelmingly in 1998, which was supported by the Clinton administration...
...The first concerns his interviews with Iraqi scientists...
...So the Bush administration concluded that it had to remove the Saddam Hussein regime once and for all, just as Clinton and Berger had suggested might someday be necessary...
...One vision was of "political pluralism" and "economic openness...
...We understand that thousands of pages of documents seized at the end of the war have still not been read...
...Specifically, Kay reported: * A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment suitable for research in the production of chemical and biological weapons...
...One reason critics have been insisting that the administration claimed the threat from Iraq was imminent, we believe, is that it is fairly easy to prove that the danger to the United States was not imminent...
...And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use this arsenal...
...Yet another level of ambiguity...
...Kay responded, "All I can say is that among an extensive body of Iraqi scientists who are talking to us, they have said: The U.N...
...Attempts to break the stalemate with Saddam and allow the U.N...
...it stood for "violent opposition to liberalizing forces...
...As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades U.N...
...Saying that action is urgent is not the same thing as saying the threat is imminent...
...to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions...
...Khan that has been so central to nuclear proliferation to rogue states has been exposed...
...We have addressed that claim...
...But a big part of the threat involved Saddam's absolute determination to arm himself with both conventional and unconventional weapons...
...Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production...
...So-called "reference strains" of biological organisms, which can be used to produce biological weapons...
...inspectors, not from U.S...
...The inspectors left, and for the next four years, Saddam's activities were shrouded in darkness...
...Is it possible that some of the unread documents contain useful information...
...There was no doubt in 1998—and there is no doubt today, based on David Kay's findings—that Saddam was seeking both to pursue WMD programs and to conceal his efforts from U.N...
...Indeed, the fact that he had the weapons, some argued, was all the more reason why the United States should not go to war...
...The majority of the Democratic party foreign policy establishment supported the war, and not because they were misled by the Bush administration's rhetorical hype leading up to the war...
...Nor, therefore, would there have been a much greater probability of winning a unanimous vote at the Security Council for war once those additional six months had passed...
...The long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was not shortened either by the inspections or by Iraqi declarations and documentation...
...As Clinton this past summer recalled, "We might have gotten it all...
...We are prepared to believe that the large stockpiles of anthrax, ricin, VX, and other biological and chemical weapons that once existed were at some point destroyed by the Iraqis...
...interviewed us...
...Year after year, in conflict after conflict, Saddam has proven that he seeks weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, in order to use them...
...The president argued, convincingly, that it was safer—it was necessary—to act sooner...
...Resolution 1441 demanded that, within 30 days, Iraq provide "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration of all aspects of its programs to develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and dispersal systems designed for use on aircraft, including any holdings and precise locations of such weapons, components, sub-components, stocks of agents, and related material and equipment, the locations and work of its research, development and production facilities, as well as all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programs, including any which it claims are for purposes not related to weapon production or material...
...So it is very unlikely that, given another three months or six months, the Blix team would have come to any definitive conclusion one way or another...
...Nevertheless, even then he could not let the inspectors see everything...
...That is the big charge leveled by the Bush administration's critics these days...
...He invaded Kuwait in 1990...
...What if, someday in the future, terrorists like those who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons...
...A prison laboratory complex, which may have been used in human testing of biological weapons agents...
...But the central thesis of the antiwar argument as it was advanced before the war asserted that the threat from Iraq would not have been imminent even if Saddam had possessed every conceivable weapon in his arsenal...
...But the threat Saddam posed, by his "continued reign of terror inside Iraq and intimidation outside Iraq," was broader than that...
...After all, what would be accomplished if Saddam turned over stockpiles and dismantled programs, only to restart them the minute the international community turned its back...
...The Iraqis were caught lying about whether they had ever put VX nerve agent in so-called "special warheads...
...Not surprisingly, the Bush administration was even more convinced that Saddam's removal was the only answer...
...And why not...
...They hoped only that, once Saddam's noncompliance became clear, they would win unanimous support for war at the U.N...
...It was a threat to the Iraqi people and to Iraq's neighbors...
...And what were the Iraqis hiding...
...Some of it has turned out to be right...
...That was subsidiary to the larger goal, which was to achieve Iraq's disarmament, including the elimination not only of existing prohibited weapons but of all such weapons programs, to ensure that Iraq would not possess weapons of mass destruction now or in the future...
...After all, many prohibited Iraqi activities had escaped detection even while the inspectors were trying to monitor them...
...As Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month, the Iraq Survey Group "discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N...
...Therefore, their testimony that no weapons stockpiles exist could be trusted...
...As Kay reports, "They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs...
...The situation as it stood at the beginning of 1999 was troubling to all concerned, and not just to American officials...
...But we also want to address Kay's assertion...
...On some occasions Kay has claimed that, with Saddam out of power, it could be assumed that scientists once fearful of telling the truth would now be willing to speak...
...And a number of those in custody are worried about that greatly," which is "one reason they're not talking...
...In fact, of course, it was one of Bush's reasons, and the moral and humanitarian purpose provided a compelling reason for a war to remove Saddam...
...The study had "considered but rejected the possibility that Iraq had no banned weapons...
...Only the defection of Hussein Kamal had revealed that the inspectors had been wrong in their "positive conclusions on Iraq's compliance...
...Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N...
...In fact, the president said the threat was not imminent, and that we had to act (urgently) before the threat became imminent...
...inspectors access to the prohibited sites came to naught...
...III When the Bush administration came to office, therefore, it had no less reason to worry about Saddam's potential capabilities than the Clinton administration...
...There were also some "special warheads" with biological weapons agent unaccounted for...
...This was well understood...
...The Iraqis were also caught lying about their biological weapons program...
...Was this a satisfactory outcome...
...After all, fighting a "war of choice" sounds problematic...
...The clandestine international network organized by Pakistan's A.Q...
...Last month Kay also reported that Iraq "was in the early stages of renovating the [nuclear] program, building new buildings...
...Saddam's history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance...
...Efforts to find the arms after the war would be like "trying to find multiple needles in a haystack . . . against the background of not knowing how many needles may have been hidden...
...This, too, was a sufficient reason to remove him from power...
...When the Survey Group did not find the weapons in "the obvious places," presumably meaning the places that had been identified by intelligence and other sources, Kay explains, he tried other means of discovering the truth...
...The purpose was to give Saddam "one final chance" to change his stripes, to offer full cooperation by revealing and dismantling all his programs and to forswear all such efforts in the future...
...That the administration went along with the inspections process embodied in Resolution 1441 was a concession to international and domestic pressure...
...That last prediction turned out to be better than we knew at the time...
...We now know that in early 2003, Saddam assumed that the United States would once again launch a bombing campaign, but not a full scale invasion...
...He would have demonstrated once again that he was unwilling to abandon these programs, that he was unwilling to avail himself of this "last chance" and disarm once and for all...
...But those weapons, it was argued, did not pose an imminent threat to the nation because Saddam, like the Soviet Union, could be deterred...
...suspects," he would "be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet...
...But he does not believe they are...
...And it had no more reason to believe that containment would be sustainable...
...Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will...
...And Berger's argument extended beyond the issue of weapons...
...So it turns out there are scientists who are not talking...
...Saddam's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction was inextricably intertwined with the nature of his tyrannical rule, his serial aggression, his defiance of international obligations, and his undeniable ties to a variety of terrorists, from Abu Nidal to al Qaeda (a topic we will not cover in detail here, rather referring readers to Stephen F. Hayes's reporting in this magazine over the past year...
...teams...
Vol. 9 • February 2004 • No. 23
