Does it make any difference if our military inspectors find clear evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? Yer dern tuttin’ it does.
It is unacceptable to make the case — as several commentators on the left and the right are now doing — that the Bush administration may have exaggerated the nature and extent of the Iraqi arms program in order to form a consensus for overthrowing Saddam. The proposition is that the American people would not have backed an invasion otherwise; that the Bush team acted upon the belief that it knew what was “best for us.”
This twisted reasoning is what virtually everyone now agrees was intolerable about how the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf incident to galvanize support for escalating our military involvement in Vietnam. It is what fuels the fires of the conspiracy theorists who hold that FDR had advanced warning about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Remember, the controversy about FDR and Pearl Harbor centers on whether there is reason to think that FDR actually knew that Japanese attack was imminent. FDR’s defenders argue that it is fever swamp logic to think that he had such foreknowledge. No reputable observer goes so far as to maintain that he should have deceived the American public in order to secure their support for a war against Japan and Germany, if he did.
And yet some commentators have come to the conclusion that such a deception would be, well, not impermissible in the case of Saddam Hussein’s regime; that the Iraqi dictator had to go even if it required some smoke and mirrors to get the American people on board. Consider the following from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman: “The ‘moral reason’ for the war was that Saddam’s regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped. But because the Bush team never dared to spell our the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reason and moral reasons, it opted for the ‘stated reason’: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with al-Quaida, and that we couldn’t take the nation to war ‘on the wings of a lie.’”
Friedman has since changed his mind: “Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam’s genocidal evil, my view was that Bush did not need to find any WMDs to justify the war for me.” He argues that “America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world…because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured,” and that the “only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world …and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble.”
I suspect the day will come when Friedman will squirm uncomfortably when he rereads those words. Perhaps if there were a universal draft and all of us had family members dying in the deserts of Iraq, it would not be inappropriate to pronounce that “we” are “ready to kill, and to die” to neutralize a menacing Arab government. But that is not the case. I would bet that Friedman doesn’t have even a friend in the military, much less a family member. It is a lot easier to call for moral crusades when no one you know will be placed in harm’s way when the fighting starts.
Indeed, as Mark Shields notes in a recent column, only one member of the Congress who voted for the war has a son in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. military. It is one of the great ironies of our time in history: When political commentators talk about our “national resolve” and “willingness to sacrifice” for a war effort, they are talking about how the nation will react in their living rooms when they see American body bags on the nightly news, and whether we will be willing to pay $2.00 a gallon for gas if things get rough. Perhaps people whose “sacrifice” for a war effort does not go beyond such hardships would not mind finding out that they had the wool pulled over their eyes, especially if gas prices keep going down. I suspect the families of service men and women killed in action will think otherwise.
Don’t get me wrong. I am confident that evidence of WMDs will turn up. In fact, I think most of those who are attacking Bush on this issue actually believe Saddam had such weapons. It looks to me as if they are playing a high-stakes game of chicken, hoping that the evidence does not turn up until they can do political damage to Bush. We should not forget that Bill Clinton made speeches accusing Saddam of developing weapons of mass destruction; that the Congressional Democrats who voted to back the war with Iraq told us at the time that they had seen intelligence reports indicating the danger posed by Saddam’s regime. Come on: If Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction, why did he go to such great efforts to hinder the work of the UN inspectors last year? The man was hiding something more than his swimming pools and porn collection.
Then why can’t we find them? We have to keep things in perspective. Look how long it took the FBI to find the accused anti-abortion bomber Eric Rudolph, who was hiding in the mountains of North Carolina in an area that would fit into a tiny corner of Iraq. A lot of Democrats who are beating Bush over the head with this issue may have to eat some crow around election time.
My quarrel, then, is not with the Bush administration — unless evidence of a deliberate deception surfaces. It is with those who are floating this idea that it does not matter if we were deceived about Saddam’s weapons programs. Something is out of kilter with that proposition. The political stability of the Middle East is important, but that not that important.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
