Not So Fast

Christopher Hitchens has a cogent article on how the crowing of the anti-war crowd doesn’t match the facts. For all the cries that “Iraq was never a threat!” the evidence suggests otherwise.

The truly annoying thing that I find when I am arguing with opponents of the regime-change policy in Iraq is their dogged literal-mindedness. “Your side said that coalition troops would be greeted with ‘sweets and flowers!’ ” Well, I have seen them with my own eyes being ecstatically welcomed in several places. “But were there actual sweets and flowers?” Then again, “You said there was an alliance between Bin Laden and Saddam, and now people think that Saddam was behind 9/11.” Well, the administration hasn’t said there was a 9/11 connection, but there are reams of verifiable contact between al-Qaida and Baghdad. Bin Laden supported Saddam, and his supporters still do, and where do you think this lovely friendship was going? “But there’s no direct link between Saddam and 9/11.” Finally, “You said that weapons of mass destruction would be found, and they haven’t been.” Well, what I said in my Slate/Plume book was that the programs were latent—which is why we wouldn’t face WMD in case of an invasion, as the peace movement kept saying we would—but that I had been believably told of stuff hidden in a mosque and that I had every reason to think that Saddam Hussein was trying to make up for what he’d lost or illegally destroyed by buying it off the shelf from North Korea. Incidentally, if the Iraqis destroyed the stocks they had once declared, they were in serious breach of the U.N. resolutions, which stipulated that they be handed over and accounted for. “But they said they’d find actual stuff.”

As Hitchens notes, the Iraqis were trying to obtain long-range weapons and nuclear technology from North Korea, and had the US not intervened it is highly likely he would have gotten it. Sooner or later the situation in Iraq would have developed into a major humanitarian and security crisis. The logic that the world should simply wait until the Middle East breaks down makes no more sense than someone arguing that they’ll stop eating Twinkies for every meal when they finally keel over of a heart attack. It’s an argument that is prima facie absurd in a post September 11 age. You do not wait for hundreds of thousands of people to die before you take action to eliminate a threat.

The arguments made in the pre-war period still hold up, although not in as dramatic a fashion as some had painted them. Did Iraq have an unconventional weapons program? The Kay Report indicates that it did, and provides photographic and documented evidence of the fact. The alternate explanations are unconvincing. You don’t stow laboratory equipment in a mosque to make lemonade, and you don’t sterilize equipment with bleach so the US troops will have a clean lab to look at. Did Iraq have a missile program? Yes, they were working on banned missile technology and looking to buy banned weapons from North Korea. Was Iraq a threat to the region? Their support of Hizb’Allah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups is well documented by numerous US and foreign sources. Was Hussein commiting humanitarian crimes against his own people? With 500,000 people found in mass graves, there is no grounds for a contrary argument. That ground alone was sufficient to motivate President Clinton to engage in a military operation in Kosovo without the support of the UN.

In the end, the arguments that the American public was somehow lied into war is unsupportable. Considering that the consensus was that Iraq had significant WMD programs and capabilities, if there was a lie it was a lie propagated by the UN, prominent Democrats, foreign intelligence services, and former Iraqi scientists. There is a point where arguing a conspiracy makes no sense of the only people not in the conspiracy were the ones making the accusation. Furthermore, as Hitchens notes:

There were predictions made by the peaceniks, too, that haven’t come literally true, or true at all. There has been no refugee exodus, for example, of the kind they promised. No humanitarian meltdown, either. No mass civilian casualties. All of these things would of course come to pass, and right away, if the Iraqi “resistance” succeeded in sabotaging the coalition presence. But I refuse to believe that any antiwar person is so keen on vindication as to wish for anything like that.

Unfortunately, while Hitches may be reticient to believe such a thing, given the way in which the anti-war left argues that we should get the US out and the UN in, that wish may be naive. The MoveOn crowd has to realize that the UN has neither desire nor the capability of stablizing Iraq, and getting the US out and the UN in would be tantamount to plunging the country into absolute chaos and creating a complex humanitarian emergency that would cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

However, the left was willing to ignore 500,000 Iraqi deaths before, and if it meant the end of the Bush Administration that would gladly ignore another 500,000. Much like the suicide bombers that plague Iraq now, the radical left cares only for their cause rather than the lives of the people involved.