WMD: An Aside

Saddam Hussein was doing his best to develop a weapons program that included nuclear, biological, and chemical options. Saddam Hussein was equally obsessed with finding ways to weaponize these items quickly. He had a clear connection to terrorist organizations who regularly attacked American holdings internationally, and was more than willing to destabilize the region to further his own political machinations. President Bush believed that Saddam posed a threat to the region and, ultimately, to the United States.

Did the Bush White House exaggerate the potential danger in order to mobilize Americans toward a greater goal? Chris Hitchens certainly thinks so--but he also thinks this isn't such a bad thing.

There were those who favored regime change in Iraq in any case, and who thought that the WMD argument would serve as a mobilizing tool. And there were those who opposed regime change in Iraq who would not now change their minds if all the specified weapons had actually been found. (One knows this about the most prominent of the anti-war spokesmen, not only because one knows them but because they continue to carp about the interventions in Afghanistan and Kosovo and Bosnia, even though the evidence against al-Qaida and the Taliban and Milosevic continues to outpace what was known at the time. It seems only yesterday that the "anti-war" forces were complaining about the paucity of mass graves in Kosovo.) Both sides at different times overstated the immediacy of the problem: the administration by rushing into print with some recycled crap and the anti-warriors by scare-mongering that a confrontation with Saddam would bring on a WMD apocalypse.

And who knows what remnants of a weapons program that goes far beyond the mobile labs and papers may still be found? The UN had over a decade to look; the military has had only a couple months. This story hasn't even come close to running its course yet.

Hitchens goes on to make some great points about the anti-war side as a whole. For them, this war wasn't undesirable because it did or didn't serve any greater good, but simply because America (and the coalition) was involved. It doesn't matter that we've found mass graves or toppled an inhumane regime; America was the bad guy simply because it's America.

In taking Senator Kerry to task for his recent statements, Hitchens goes full bore after the anti-war crowd in his own special, vitriolic way.

It is amazingly unlikely that the Saddam regime had no plan to preserve or restart its long-standing WMD scheme, though the evidence for this may involve some complex study and not take a "gotcha" or "smoking gun" form.

The overwhelming consensus among inspectors and monitors, including Hans Blix's sidekick Mohammed ElBaradei, is now to the effect that Iran's mullahs have indeed been concealing an enriched-uranium program. For good measure, it is a sure thing that they are harboring al-Qaida activists on their territory. Will the "peace" camp ever admit that Bush was right about this? Or about the "evil" of North Korea: a demented starvation regime now threatening to export ready-to-use nuclear weapons (which Saddam Hussein, say, might have been interested in buying)? Don't make me laugh: The furthest the peaceniks will go is to say that Bush's rhetoric made these people turn nasty. I am not teasing here: The best of the anti-war polemicists is Jonathan Schell, who advanced this very claim in a debate with me earlier this month. Meanwhile, the overwhelming moral case for regime change in both countries is once again being left to the forces of neoconservatism, with the liberals pulling a long face while they wait to be reluctantly "persuaded."

Hitchens is no friend of Republicans or Bush. He's simply a clear-eyed liberal who realizes that his own party has abandoned honesty and strength in a dramatic way. He realizes that his own party is doing its best to pave the way for a much more dangerous and powerless future for the United States.

Did Bush exaggerate the threat? I think the President most likely chose the reports that were most damning while leaving dissenting opinions back in the cutting room. But I think he did it not out of a desire to mislead, but out of an honest belief that a) Saddam Hussein needed to go whether weapons of mass destruction were or weren't found, and, b) that there wasn't room for being wrong. If the worst of the reports were true, then the damage from the next terrorist attack would be far more painful than what we experienced on 9/11.

He made the right choice. And the administration's response to North Korea and Iran prove that they're not just gunning for bad guys--they're taking measured responses to different situations in hopes of securing America's future well-being.

Here's to Hitchens for being a constant, strong voice from the left that understands the dangers our country faces. I don't think any of the current Democratic candidates has such a clear vision, and that lack of comprehension is precisely why I'll continue to work against their campaigns.

Read the article on Slate.

Posted by zombyboy at June 24, 2003 05:11 PM | TrackBack