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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: All in Good Time (October 14, 2003) Why did the Novak-spy and Schwarzenegger sex stories take so long to emerge? It's a story all its own. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: Why the Jobs Went to China—And How to Get Them Back (October 14, 2003) If the yuan were revalued the Mack companies could start making computer servers again. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Triumph of Change (October 14, 2003) Next year Bush will be selling just what Davis was selling—continuity. By William Schneider. Media: Out of Character (October 6, 2003) Character journalism gives most journalists the creeps, but maybe they've defined it too narrowly. By William Powers. Social Studies: America Has a Brilliant Strategy for Iraq: Muddle Through (October 6, 2003) With Saddam toppled less than six months ago, defeatism today reflects badly not on Bush, but on his critics. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: The White House Leak Scandal: Is a Cover-Up in the Works? (October 6, 2003) The investigation will be credible only if shielded from any but the most nominal supervision by Ashcroft. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Sagging Male Support (October 6, 2003) President Bush's support among men has plunged because they are upset about jobs. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Wealth of Nations 
The War Against Iraq: All a Big Mistake?
With hindsight, the war in Iraq looks ever more doubtful. by Clive Crook .... Knowing what we do now about the war against Saddam Hussein and its aftermath—and given what we have learned about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction—was it right to resort to military force? I do not see many advocates of the war changing their minds, even though events have proved some of their most important assumptions wrong. As somebody who supported the war, I am starting to feel lonely: Today, I am a lot less confident about it than my prewar allies, and I'm getting ready to admit I was wrong. Based on what was known and plausibly believed at the time, I still think the war was justified from both a moral and a strategic point of view. I also believe that the outcome, and history's final verdict, could still go either way. It is more important than ever to fight for the right verdict, by doing all it takes to make a success of the Iraq reconstruction. Yet with hindsight, the enterprise looks ever more doubtful. We fought, it seems, on a false premise. Worse, our will to make a success of the post-conflict phase seems to be ebbing. No question, the world is well rid of Saddam. That is a huge gain—but it was not the main goal. The larger purpose was to make the West safer. In this, I doubt that the war has succeeded. Steadfast advocates of force against Saddam are arguing, when they can bring themselves to acknowledge the fact at all, that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction is no more than a minor annoyance. Saddam was a bad man, they say; what more do you need? I cannot agree. Perhaps caches of WMD will turn up even now. Some experts still think it likely. But if weapons are not found, it will be a calamitous setback for the foreign policy of George Bush and his allies—not least Tony Blair. This was a battle to disarm Saddam. If he had no WMD at the outset of the war, then the war's stated purpose was false. That is no minor embarrassment. The failure to find WMD has a bearing not just on the short-term pros and cons of the war, but also on the willingness of Americans and their friends to fight the next time. This is the key point. How receptive will the American and British people be when their leaders urge action to deal with the threat from the next Iraq—Iran, say, or North Korea? The war against Saddam was to have been a template for pre-emptive action against enemies of the West. No deluded multilateralist, I strongly favor action of that kind in certain circumstances. But pre-emption demands reliable intelligence. The abject failure of intelligence-gathering in Iraq, and the public's suspicions over that failure, make it quite likely that the war against Saddam will be the last, as well as the first, such undertaking. In short, I fear that America has disarmed not just Iraq, but itself. So long as we are indulging in hindsight, it is important to recognize that, in many other ways, those who made the case for war stand vindicated. The defeat of Saddam's army was an awesome demonstration of American military force. I hear no apologies or retractions from those who predicted a long, bloody, and inconclusive war. What we have learned about Saddam's astounding brutality toward his own people, about the corruption of the regime and the terror it inflicted on its subjects, also exceeds most previous accounts. But America and Britain did not topple Saddam because he was cruel to his own people, or because they could do it at relatively low cost in blood. They did it, or so they said, because Saddam was a clear and present danger to themselves. That was the basis on which the public lent its support to the venture. And it is where the facts now seem badly at odds with what the American and British people were told. It is not enough to reply that evidence of Iraqi WMD programs, as opposed to actual weapons, is turning up—and, in fact, there is little clear evidence even of this. It is certainly not enough to point to Iraq's capacity to restart such programs in the future, which seems to be the rationale the two governments are now tending toward. I doubt that public opinion could have been persuaded to back the war on these grounds. Of this, we will never be sure. But it no longer matters very much: The fact is, this is not the case that was put to the public. The governments of America and Britain told their people and the world at large that Iraq had WMD, available for use at short notice against Western interests, or for handing over to terrorists if Saddam was so inclined. As far as we know, that was wrong. Did the Bush administration and the Blair government simply lie about it? Did they say that Iraq had WMD, knowing it to be untrue? Surely not. To any fair-minded person, the circumstantial case for Saddam's possessing WMD was all but overwhelming. He was known to have WMD when U.N. inspectors were ejected from Iraq in the 1990s, and he obstructed the inspectors when they resumed their investigations shortly before the war. If by then he had no WMD, all he had to do to avert the war was make a full and frank disclosure to that effect—that is, verify that his WMD stocks had been destroyed. Saddam chose not to do this. Intelligence agencies in every Western country—not just America and Britain, but France and others too—were convinced that Iraq had WMD. I cannot believe that George Bush and Tony Blair just plain lied about it. But I do think they and their officials are guilty of a milder sort of dishonesty. Believing, on the basis of this compelling circumstantial evidence, that Saddam did have WMD, they overstated the strength of what little hard intelligence they possessed. In Britain, the glossing of meager intelligence—the failure to tell the whole truth about its substance, its provenance, and doubts concerning its reliability—has been well documented by the judicial inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly, the expert on Iraqi WMD who shared his own doubts on the subject with the BBC. Indications are that similar, if less flamboyant, spinning of the intelligence went on in the United States. If Iraq had turned out to have WMD, there would have been no problem with this. Now that it looks as if Iraq did not, the result is a collapse of trust in government, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned—something that opinion polls in both countries, especially Britain, are pointing to. That bodes ill for the ongoing war on terrorism. At stake is nothing less than America's credibility—not as an overwhelmingly forceful opponent, which it plainly is, but as an opponent willing to use its overwhelming force. The country's anxious reaction to continuing casualties in Iraq (which were predictable), mounting opposition to the costs of reconstruction (ditto), dithering over the role that the U.N. might play (contrasting with America's earlier conviction that it could cope perfectly well on its own), and signs that the administration was ill-prepared for its postwar commitments all point the same way: This is an experience that America will not care to repeat. America's enemies are certain to take note. America and Britain must resolve to make a conspicuous success of their defeat of Saddam. They must steel themselves to accept the obligations, military and economic, that they have taken on. If other allies can be persuaded to share the burden, fine. But the United States and Britain must not be tempted to regard a lack of meaningful help from skeptics such as France and Germany as an excuse for failure. The United States and Britain chose to make Iraq their responsibility. There must be no shirking, no hesitating over the cost. The White House has just announced that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, will take charge in Iraq. It denies that the move reflects disappointment over progress so far. The new appointment is encouraging—but if the White House is not disappointed, it should be. Aside from resolving to repair Iraq's infrastructure as quickly as possible and to move the country to democratic self-government with all haste, America and Britain have another equally pressing job to do: They need to acknowledge the catastrophic failure of intelligence that the war against Saddam has revealed, to find out why it happened, and to make sure that it is not repeated. Determination to confront our enemies before they attack us is admirable, in my view. But this policy will be dangerous, not to mention impossible to sell to voters, without reliable information about the threats our enemies pose. The failure to find WMD in Iraq is surprising, all right—but not as surprising as the evident lack of concern over that failure in the White House and Downing Street.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Clive Crook is a columnist for National Journal and the deputy editor of The Economist. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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