The missing weapons

Andrew Sullivan says everything I'd say, but much more eloquently.

Did Bush lie about Iraq's WMD programs to drag America into war? If you believe that, you have to believe he was devious enough to plant evidence of WMDs among all the intelligence services of the world, several years before he even became President, and that he'd be devious enough to demand a war for no particular reason, but not devious enough to stage a miraculous "discovery" of a massive WMD cache under one of Saddam's palaces.

You can believe all of that if you want, but I am convinced that Bush was as sure of Iraqi WMDs as the rest of us were. And, as David Kay himself has noted, American intelligence services have a lot to answer for. (As do the British, and even several other governments which opposed the war, not to mention the UN itself.) The best thing this President can do is come clean, admit that his government was mistaken, and commence an inquiry into what went wrong.

This President should not, on the other hand, apologize for a war which belatedly removed one of the worst tyrants of the past century, gave Iraqis hope of creating the Middle East's first non-Israeli democracy, scared the piss out of the likes of Moammar Ghaddafi, cut off a major funding source for genocidal Palestinian suicide murderers, eliminated a safe haven for notorious Islamist terrorists (including at least one connected to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), and generally made the Middle East a significantly less stagnant swamp. There were many reasons to eliminate Saddam Hussein, and only one of them - the WMD argument - has proven unfounded. Saddam's human-rights record was even worse than we thought, and tantalizing evidence of complicity with Islamofascist terror - including Al-Qaida itself - has bubbled to the surface (and been largely ignored by the "compliant corporate media").

I have no doubt that Saddam would have resumed his WMD programs as soon as the sanctions against Iraq were lifted - the sanctions the ultra-left demanded we eliminate unconditionally, you'll remember - but our fears that he had weapons of mass destruction now have proven unfounded. Heads should roll. But this only makes the war unjustified if you believe it was the only reason it was started.

Posted by damian at January 26, 2004 01:01 PM