Ann Coulter, everyone’s favorite rail-thin raving ideologue, has a column in which she argues that no one cares about Iraqi WMDs.
Well, for one, I care.
WMDs were only one of the reasons for invading Iraq, but they were also the reason most stressed by the Bush Administration. If Saddam did not have WMDs, then the Bush Adminstration still did the right thing, but they also put the credibility of the office on the line. They told the American people that Iraq had WMDs. The US intelligence community and the UN also said that Iraq had WMDs. Iraq more than likely did possess weapons of mass destruction. We have found the mobile labs used to produce some of those weapons, now we need to follow up on what we have.
It is clear that WMDs do matter. If they are not found, it does not mean that the war was unjustified, but it does mean that Bush will take a hit on his credibility. Granted, Coulter is right that many will not care, but it is important to know that if our intelligence was wrong, why it was wrong and how it can be made more accurate.
Coulter does raise another good point – many people were predicting that if the US attacked Iraq it would lead to a chemical or biological attack against Israel or US troops. She even catches the NYT‘s Nicholas Kristof warning of Saddam unleashing his weapons of mass destruction, and later saying that they didn’t exist. Indeed there seems to be a considerable degree of hypocrisy on the part of the anti-war crowd. It is inconsistant to argue that Iraqi WMDs were a threat then turn around and say that those weapons never existed.
As much as I find Coulter to be the kind of raving ideologue that places vitriol over substance, she’s got things half right here. While WMDs do matter, so does the hypocrisy of Kristof and others.
Coulter (and you to a large extent) are on damage control mode. You recognize that the fraudulent claims to war by Team Bush could become the PR nightmare here that it already is for Tony Blair in Britain. Granted, the American people aren’t bright enough to take Bush to task on his lies just yet, but all this news footage run night after night could change that dynamic rather quickly. The left’s counterclaims during the debate leading to the war was more a series of worst-case scenarios that Team Bush chose not to consider and wanted nobody else to consider. Nobody that I know of was specifically guaranteeing Iraq would use WMD’s when Saddam’s back was up against the wall, they were just saying it was a very strong possibility. Meanwhile, Team Bush was giving us solid assurances of non-existent WMD’s, just as you have been doing about four times a week even in the embarrassing weeks following the war.
Where did we go wrong in warning that if he did have them, he would obviously use them, therefore since none were used, he must not of had any? Makes perfect sense to me.
Here’s Ann:
“The United Nations weapons inspectors repeatedly found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, right up until Saddam threw them out in 1998.”
Here’s the Council on Foreign Relations:
“Did the inspectors find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
Yes—and they destroyed more of them than the U.S.-led coalition did during the Gulf War. Among other things, U.N. inspectors located hundreds of tons of chemical weapons agents and thousands more tons of the chemicals used to make them; a major biological weapons production facility; machines for separating out radioactive isotopes that could be used to fuel a nuclear bomb; and dozens of missiles, launching pads, and missile warheads for both conventional and chemical munitions. Inspectors were stunned by the volume of information and material they found, and surprised that Iraq’s weapons programs were much more advanced than they had expected.
The inspections worked.