WMDs Don’t Matter, Stupid
written by Lancelot Finn, winter 2004
I don’t mean politically. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But they shouldn’t. Saddam’s possession of WMDs was cosmetic. It was a soundbite the press could grab—would grab, whatever the president did. It was a hook for the issue at the UN. Anyone who understood the case for war against Saddam has gotten over the absence of WMDs ages ago. Will the press please please please quit wasting our time blathering about it?
All right, I’m getting ahead of myself. Suppose there are no WMDs in Iraq, as it appears now. Why did we go to war? Was the war a mistake?
First of all, Saddam was a murderous dictator whose regime was built on fear, who was hated by his people, who had committed genocide against the Kurds, who had attacked his neighbors and sponsored terrorism. The press portrayed Cheney and Rumsfeld as having anticipated that the Iraqis would “welcome us as liberators,” and ridiculed them for it. But to the extent that they did that, they were mostly right. They celebrated in the streets as coalition forces moved through the Shiite south. They celebrated in Baghdad on April 9th when the regime fell. They chanted “America always!” They celebrated even more when Saddam Hussein was captured. Of course there were setbacks, there was resistance. But it was a minority. Will Iraq become a democracy? Maybe, maybe not. Will Iraq be better off than it was under Saddam Hussein? You can bet on it.
And it might get better—a lot better. There are no democracies in the Arab world. No free countries in the Arab world. In every region of the world where it is present, Islamic countries are less likely to be democratic, and much less likely to be free. It’s not that they don’t want to be. They’re in a trap—political Islam. That’s where the neocon dream comes in. Will the example of democracy and freedom in Iraq create pressures to overturn dictatorships throughout the Middle East? Will the Islamic bloc unravel and give way to a new dawn of freedom, as the Communist bloc in eastern Europe once did? To say yes is too bold at this point; hope is appropriate here, rather than prediction of success. But imagine that the vision came true, what would the beginning of that realization look like? A lot like what’s happening right now. We’re on the right track.
The war was a good thing, but was it necessary? We sacrificed a lot of diplomatic capital, a lot of money, and the lives of about 500 American soldiers. The president said that leaving Saddam in power was “not an option.” Was this a “war of choice?” I think it was, in a sense. We thought Saddam had WMDs, now it looks like he didn’t. The sanctions worked better than we thought. We might have been able to contain Saddam with sanctions for another year, or two, or three. But at what cost?
The sanctions were an atrocity. They did not punish Saddam and his henchmen. Arundhati Roy reports that 500,000 children died as a result of the sanctions. Figures differ, but there is no doubt that far more people died as a result of the sanctions than died as a result of the war. Moreover, the sanctions were our doing. We were complicit in those deaths. Sure, some of the blame goes to Saddam, for not cooperating with the inspectors to save the lives of his people. But we undertook the sanctions. We knew the consequences of our actions, and we went on doing it. People don’t talk about the sanctions much, because who wants to be reminded that we were guilty of all those deaths? Who wants to remember the blood on our hands? Who was committing genocide here? Him, or us? Or both?
Yes, it was a war of choice. We had the choice to kill 500 Americans and ten thousand Iraqis and give Iraq a new dawn of freedom, or to go on enforcing sanctions that made far more children die in a prison state.
I opposed the sanctions as soon as I heard about the children dying. We could have lifted them unilaterally. I wanted to. But while Saddam probably didn’t have WMDs under sanctions, if we had lifted them, he soon would have had them. He probably would have gone nuclear. We haven’t found WMDs, but we found weapons labs. He was ready to get started again. Moreover, we would have sent an encouraging signal to every dictator, every aggressor in the world.
Blair and Bush were faced with a tragic choice. Lift the sanctions, and we could save the children, but we would likely be faced with a nuclear-armed Saddam soon. We probably could have held the threat of Saddam in check through keeping, or tightening, the sanctions. The third choice was too brave for a politician like Clinton even to contemplate—to tear up the rule book, and make war.
The absence of WMDs doesn’t affect the case for the war as a liberation. They don’t affect the case for war as a way to prevent the threat of a nuclear Saddam without killing children. Nor, be it noted, do they affect the legal case for war, since Saddam did fail to cooperate with the inspectors, even if he had nothing much to hide. They undermine the claim that Saddam was an “imminent threat,” but that claim was not made. Maybe some of the American people thought it was made. Maybe some of the American people believed it. Maybe some of the American people thought that that was the only reason we were going to war. There’s a word for those people. Stupid. But the case for war was not stupid. It was subtle, varied, profound, noble, visionary, decisive and as far as I’m concerned, irrefutable for informed people of conscience (of which, as the episode sadly revealed, there are precious few).
But if there are so many good reasons for the war, why did Bush and Blair talk so much about WMDs? Why did they make WMDs, and not liberation, the war’s stated motive? Well, personally I wish they hadn’t, but I think I can see several reasons why they did. First, the UN. We were trying to get backing for the war from an organization where dictators get to sit alongside democracies as if they were legitimate governments. Liberation would be a tough sell there. As soon as it was clear the UN was not going to come along, the president shifted his argument to liberation.
Liberation was the moral reason for the war but it could not be the legal reason. Second, to emphasize WMDs was a way to hedge the administration’s bets. The real reason that the war in Iraq was legitimate and right is because the overthrow of Saddam was desired by the vast majority of the Iraqi people. Bush and Blair wanted to liberate them. But we couldn’t know for sure, because you can’t measure the climate of opinion in a totalitarian state. What we did think we knew is that he had illegal WMDs, not because of the intelligence, but because he had to have something to hide, otherwise why did he go on starving his own people? This is still an unsolved mystery. Anyway, we (thought we) knew he had WMDs, and we could disarm him, and just in case it turned out that Saddam had a lot of support and Iraqis did not greet us as liberators, we could disarm him and go. If, as they hoped, the Iraqis did greet us as liberators, that would provide an overwhelming justification for the war.
Forgive me if I’m a little huffy here. But I really feel like the press is treating us all like we’re stupid. The polls have never shown much response to the WMD issue. Support for the war has slipped up and down depending on how successful the political transition seems to be. WMDs became irrelevant on April 9th, when the fall of the dictator was greeted with joy by the Iraqi people; a new and better reason for the war had replaced them. The American people understood that. The British people understood that. Tom Friedman understands it. I suspect most journalists understand it, but they think they have to keep talking about WMDs, because it’s an “issue” since it was the administration’s stated motive for the war. I wouldn’t call this a liberal bias in the media exactly. It’s more like a stupid bias, and those of who have brains are getting fed up with it. So hello, Big Media, will you please please please shut up about WMDs?! They don’t matter, stupid.