'Everyone Believed Saddam Had Weapons,' the Argument that Won't Die Posted by David Shorr

Do you want to know who gets my hackles up? Richard Perle. I'd be happy to just let his voice fade away, along with other proponents of the Iraq War, but there he was on our televisions again last week as part of the PBS "America at a Crossroads" series. Perle had his own documentary in the series, "The Case for War - In Defense of Freedom", which follows him through recent travels (and encounters with critics) to elucidate his worldview.

I will have to wait until a transcript of the film is available before I can detail everything irritating about it. What prompts me to write today, though, is a tried and true argument in defense of the war that Perle reprises: "we all believed Saddam had WMD." This is the zombie of Iraq War debate arguments. It stubbornly refuses to die and will continue to be a distraction until it is finally killed off.

According to this history of the 2002-03 run-up to the war, there was broad consensus, domestically and internationally, about Saddam's WMD. You can find a thorough debunk in Fred Kaplan's November 2005 Slate piece. I'm more interested in how this argument works and why it's being deployed.

The aim here is to tame the historic strategic blunder of the Iraq War, shrink it down to an honest mistake (a sincere and unwitting error), and spread the ownership (and blame) all the way around. According to the proverb, failures are said to be orphans. But denying paternity of this war is difficult, so it must have as many parents as possible. ...it takes a village...

In this village, everyone saw the same information and reached the same conclusions. Indeed, supporters of the war seem to be accusing the skeptics of being newfound in their skepticism; it is the latter, supposedly, who are distancing themselves from failure. The controversy is all after-the-fact, rather than before. Where was everybody?

In reality, of course, the war has been fraught with controversy from the very beginning. If everyone saw the same information, what was the big deal about the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake from Niger? Why did Colin Powell spend all those late nights at Langley and then insist George Tenet sit behind him at the UN Security Council? Why couldn't the US muster the votes in the Council? And what was all that fuss over inspections? (Hats off to the alert washingtonpost.com webchat participant from Alexandria who pressed Perle on exactly this point with regard to Hans Blix; it's the next-to-last question). And why has there been such delay and tug of war over a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation into the possible manipulation of intelligence?

As we know, the advocates of the Iraq invasion pushed it with the hardest of hard-sells. The Congress surely should have hit the brakes on the rush to war. But E.J. Dionne wrote perhaps the best column on the politics of Iraq when he reminded us that, far from being allowed to reach their own conclusions, congressmembers were told that their vote on the war was a test of their willingness to defend the nation.

Wars of necessity sell themselves. Wars of choice should be a matter of choice -- tough calls that demand just the kind of deliberation that a democracy is supposed to be good at. But it takes a certain temerity to ram through a decision to go to war and try to spread the blame when it doesn't work out.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

As we know, the advocates of the Iraq invasion pushed it with the hardest of hard-sells. The Congress surely should have hit the brakes on the rush to war. But E.J. Dionne wrote perhaps the best column on the politics of Iraq when he reminded us that, far from being allowed to reach their own conclusions, congressmembers were told that their vote on the war was a test of their willingness to defend the nation.

The men and women of Congress are grown, reasoning adults. They are neither children nor slaves. To reach their own conclusions, nobody had to "allow" them to do anything. And if they failed to exercise their capacity for mature, independent judgment simply because "they were told" - by some nameless bullies apparently - that they had to vote for the war to display "their willingness to defend the nation," then they are miserable cowards who are unfit to govern.

[Cal]

And if they failed to exercise their capacity for mature, independent judgment simply because "they were told" - by some nameless bullies apparently - that they had to vote for the war to display "their willingness to defend the nation," then they are miserable cowards who are unfit to govern.

Perhaps, but by this standard almost every Congress has been unfit to govern. The Spanish American War, the Mexican War, the War of 1812. How many Congresses have been willing to buck a beligerent president?

OTOH, I'd have a lot more sympathy for our representatives if they had actually read the NIE before voting:

No more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page National Intelligence Estimate executive summary, according to several congressional aides responsible for safeguarding the classified material. The lack of congressional attention to the nitty-gritty details of Iraq's weapons programs is symptomatic of Congress's approach to a range of intelligence matters...

These guys can't even bother going through the motions.

[JP]

Dan - "then they are miserable cowards who are unfit to govern."

I believe that's why they lost the majority in November.

[Dan Kervick]

I was talking about both parties JP.

[Coalition of the Drilling]

This article makes sense only in a democratic society - which, unfortunately, the US is no more. During the run up to the invasion I had a lot less "information" than Senators and Representatives. Yet I never once thought that Saddam had those famous WMDs. How come? (other than listening to what the weapons inspectors really said) Maybe it's because, unlike the US legislators, I have the courage to think "outside the box", not to eagerly eat up those ready-to-go fast food bits that the mass media serve us on a daily basis. Or maybe it's just that I am not on the pay list of big business who really wanted this war, sorry, invasion.

[Tom]

I was also kind of stunned by the Perle documentary, for several reasons but most starkly because he didn't even try to make an affirmative defense of the decision to go to war. His argument basically went as follows:

1. Saddam was a very bad man.
2. "everyone" - most importantly, prominent Democrats - thought he was dangerous and might have WMDs.
3. Other Democrats - notably JFK - have thought for a long time that promoting democracy abroad is better than promoting tyranny.
4. If we leave before Iraq is a stable democracy (however long that takes) there's a risk that the Middle East could REALLY implode. [Note that he didn't try to argue that our presence in Iraq is a stabilizing factor in any way, just that staying is the least awful of the options in front of us. And of coure he never gets further than asserting that this is so, never looks at any of the alternatives, and never acknowledges that the only reason we're down to these shitty choices is that he & his old boss got us into Iraq in the first place.]
5. Now let's talk about 9/11, and Afghanistan, and how radical Islamists oppress women, and how brave Richard Perle is for listening to people who are pissed at him.

That's pretty much it. It was an astonishingly weak piece of argumentation. Bracketed by a wide range of other segments in that series - pieces that cover Iraq & the war on terror from a lot of different perspectives but all have some basis in reportage & evidence & a discernable, coherent argument to make - the impression it left me with was sort of a confession: in its context, it's a damning indictment of the decision to go to war & a tacit admission that it was a catastrophic mistake.

[JP]

Dan, as much as I want to believe they were "Free to disagree," the amount of political pressure after 9/11 and before March '03 was stifling. That fact is directly traceable to the administration, and all of us recognize that. Yes, they should have been more diligent, but if it were up to me, anyone that was in office at that point should be held responsible. To say that it was Congress' fault is intellectually dishonest.

Much of the cheerleading behind the invasion did, despite your wanting to deny it, come from the majortiy party in Congress. They proved themselves unworthy of power over several years and paid the price.

[Dan Kervick]

JP, I do recall the atmosphere of pressure and intimidation that prevailed back then. But it is ever the job of political leaders to make sound decisions in circumstances of great pressure and stress. If they are too weak to perform that job, they should seek other employment - or rather we voters should consign them to other employment. As Paine said, these are the times that try men's souls. And a large number of our political leaders, from both parties, failed the trial.

I didn't say anything to suggest that the bad decisions were all Congress's fault. But they were partly Congress's fault. Nor did I say anything to mitigate the chief responsibility of what was the majority party at the time. As the majority party, and the party controlling the executive branch at the same time, they clearly bear the majority of the responsibility. But the 2002 display of moral cowardice, intellectual laziness and conformism, opportunism and shameless demagoguery was a bipartisan performance.

Personally, I don't think the situation is really any better now. My faith in the capacity of our political system to escape from the realms of myth, ignorance, violence and fantasy, to lay hold of reality, and to respond intelligently to it, is at its lowest ebb ever. At least in 2002 and 2003, amidst all the turbulence, I was energized by anger and a conception of a clear enemy. I had more hope. But now, with the 2006 election in the books and a new cast of characters in the majority, it is clear just how systemic and broad-based the problems are - at least the problems which are of greatest concern to me. The current campaign doesn't move me at all. From where I sit, not a single figure gets it.

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