WMD Counterfactuals

Max Sawicky, still fretting about the future of the nation, laments that during the election "On the war, the argument was basically there were no WMDs so the invasion was unjustified. In other words, if there were WMDs, it would have been. Might have been, with a 'competent' Administration." Everyone knows where I stand on the competence issue. The WMD one, is, I think, interesting and complicated. In particular, one of the paradoxes of the Iraq War is that though it was sold with reference to an advanced Iraqi nuclear program, had there actually been both an advanced Iraqi nuclear program and a US administration genuinely concerned about it, there almost certainly wouldn't have been a war.

After all, if there had been an advanced nuclear program, the IAEA inspectors would have found it. Having found it, they would have destroyed it. Having destroyed it, destroying Saddam's WMD program hardly would have served as a casus belli, particularly for an administration that that was worried about nukes in a good-faith way rather than deploying them as a bad-faith scare story.

Long story short, it's not incredibly clear what scenario the counterfactual is specifying here.

One possibility is that there is a nuclear program, the IAEA finds evidence of it, but Saddam straightforwardly refuses to disarm -- perhaps ejecting the inspectors again. Had that happened, there would have been war. But it would have been a very different war. It would, for example, have secured Security Council authorization and the military coalition would have included at least token contributions from a wide range of countries. It would, what's more, have had much more limited goals -- creation of some kind of stable, nuke-free regime -- none of these grand ambitions to remake Iraqi society or transform the geopolitics of the region. I think that might have more-or-less worked. What's more, though I know the more serious anti-interventionists of the world will disagree with me, I also think you'd have to call a duly authorized war designed to enforce bona fide cease-fire terms of an earlier war that was, in turn, duly authorized by the UN in response to an Iraqi breach of the norm against conquering your neighbors a non-imperialist military venture.

Now, all that being said, I still think deciding that late 2002 and early 2003 was a good time to implement a big focus on Iraq would have been a policy error. There were much better things to be focusing on at the time, namely stabilizing Afghanistan, pursuing bona fide al-Qaeda terrorists, and trying to work to get the Israel-Palestine peace process rebooted.

Comments

I think the counter-factual ignores the fact that Bush etc knew that there were no WMDs to find.

No way that they believed the Mr. Softee trucks were biological labs.

No way that they believed in aging stocks of chemical weapons.

No way that they believed in hidden nuclear industry. (They knew, for example, that the aluminum tubes were NOT for centrifuges.)

And, most of all, they repeatedly turned up jack on their hot tips for WMDS. Time and time again, they went to the well with inside info. Does anyone really believe that they were sure that the next one would turn up something?

The WMDs were simply -- as Wolfowitz said after the war -- the pretext that they agreed to put forward in public.

What if there were? Well, what if Saddam had a tail?

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 14, 2006 2:33 PM

I don't agree with Jeffrey Davis; I think the Bushies, while knowing Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons, figured it had some sort of biological or chemical stockpiles that could "justify" the invasion. I'm somewhat surprised that such stockpiles didn't "show up."

Yglesias's post aptly addresses the nuclear question, but what if Iraq had had lesser WMDs. One of the intelligence findings that Bush chose to ignore was the Saddam would be unlikely to use chemical or biological weapons *unless* he was attacked--which puts the invasion in an even worse light, if that's possible. I'm always amused and horrified when Bush says things like, "Unfortunately, Iraq didn't have WMD." Well, imagine if he did.

Posted by david mizner | November 14, 2006 2:55 PM

You're missing the point, matt.

Max doesn't care if there would ahve been war if Iraq had had a nuclear program, or if there should have been.

What he cares about is that opposition to the Iraq war is being framed in the narrowest possible terms, to leave the broadest scope for future military interventions abroad. He wants a general lesson to be drawn from Iraq -- that the US should not invade foreign countries. But he sees the netroots drawing a very specific lesson -- George W. Bush should not have invaded Iraq in 2003.

Issue isn't retrospective, it's prospective. So it really doesn't mater what the counterfactual is.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 14, 2006 2:56 PM

In other words, the position Max objects to is precisely the one expressed by Jeffrey Davis: that in looking back at the decision to go to war in 2003, the questions we need to ask are about the lies and mistakes of the Bush administration.

Instead we should be worried about ourselves: about the general willingness of elite opinion-makers and the public to support foreign adventures.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 14, 2006 2:59 PM

...but what if Iraq had had lesser WMDs?

Same rule applies as with nukes. If they'd been significant and potent, Blix's group would have found them and destroyed them. If they were insignificant and impotent, well then it's a shell game with the public you're talking about, by people who should have known better.

Posted by BruceR | November 14, 2006 3:21 PM

.but what if Iraq had had lesser WMDs?

"Same rule applies as with nukes. If they'd been significant and potent, Blix's group would have found them and destroyed them."

I'm not sure this is true--is it? If I recall correctly, even opponents of the war weren't making the case that if Blix didn't find them, they didnt exist. Nuclear capability requires a massive apparatus that can't be hidden, but there was and is much dispute about the effectiveness of inspectors when it comes to chemical and biological WMD.

Posted by david mizner | November 14, 2006 3:27 PM

perhaps ejecting the inspectors again

wait a second. A little rewriting of history here. Saddam didn't eject the inspectors. After years of touch-and-go co-operation wit the UNSCOM inspectors, Sadddam beginning at the end of 1997 started blocking the inspectors and accused the UNSCOM teams of spying for the CIA. While the American press was obsessing with Monica Lewinsky and the blue dress, this became an on-again/off-again throughout 1998, culminating in the final withdrawal of the UN inspectors on December 16, 1998 and the start of an aerial bombing campaign a few hours later. This of course was during the weekend that the House voted for Impeachment, so of course our attention was elsewhere. The thing is, though, and again it never got attention because of the Impeachment trial, the US later acknowledged in January 1999 that, in fact, the UNSCOM team was in fact infiltrated by the CIA and was spying on Saddam. There were several articles acknowledging this in the January-March timeframe in the NYT and WaPo (do a Nexis search) - in the matter of Saddam vs. the inspectors, Saddam was right, but the US press, engaged in vilification of Saddam as a "madman", and distracted by Lewinsky, never bothered to actually entertain the idea while the controversy was running, and the subsequent acknowledgement, never really gained notice or traction and was never mentioned in the press that I could find after March 1999.

Here's where I go into tin foil hat territory, because I've never been able to adequately convince anyone to take this part seriously - but here goes. Assume that, in fact, the CIA was using UNSCOM cover to spy on Saddam at least in the 1997-1998 timeframe. Now remember, all the reports of Iraqi WMDs that Bush relied upon in 2002, and which he basically said that the world agreed with him, were based upon these 1998 UNSCOM reports. But if in 1998 the UNSCOM team was currupted by CIA infiltration and had a least a partial purpose of a spy mission, wouldn't it make sense that the UNSCOM reports had an incentive to overstate the presence of WMDs so as to ensure further and continued UNSCOM/CIA unfettered access to Iraqi facilities?

I'm not saying that Saddam was a saint in all of this, but the fact is that at least as our role went, our hands weren't clean in this either, as much as Bush and the American press tried to pretend otherwise in the runup to the 2003 invasion. It would go a long way toward solving one of the big mysteries of recent years - what happened to the WMDs - but it would involve Bush (and possibly/probably Clinton) coming clean about the US using UNSCOM as cover for CIA spying. And I just don't see that happening. When it comes to US/CIA spying our policy is generally not to publicly address or acknowledge anything. It's a wonder that those few articles actually did appear in the short window during Impeachment in 1999.

Posted by Andy | November 14, 2006 3:32 PM

I think that its important here to realize that the Administation's interest in Iraq required the absence of WMDs.

If Saddam had WMDs and disarmed, as you noted, you don't get your war. Without war,there are no political or patronage benefits.

If Saddam had WMDs and refused to disarm, then you get the "duly authorized war designed to enforce bona fide cease-fire terms of an earlier war that was, in turn, duly authorized by the UN in response to an Iraqi breach of the norm against conquering your neighbors"

The problem w/ this is that a)it justifies the existence of the UN, and b)Democrats wouldn't oppose it, so no wedge issue, and, to some degree, c)patronage would be more difficult to dish out in a multinational op.

So it became politcally important to ensure the inspectors not find any WMD. Cheney started talking about how unreliable inspections are even before there were any.In early '03, it became a vitally important national security issue to go to war NOW, because the longer the inspections went on, the more likely it was that either Iraq would be shown not to actually have WMD, or the WMD would be found and destroyed.

Posted by foolishmortal | November 14, 2006 3:49 PM

Here we go - WaPo March 2, 1999

U.S. Spied On Iraqi Military Via U.N.; Arms Control Team Had No Knowledge Of Eavesdropping

"United States intelligence services infiltrated agents and espionage equipment for three years into United Nations arms control teams in Iraq to eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency that it used to disguise its work, according to U.S. government employees and documents describing the classified operation." etc.

NYT Feb 23, 1999

Ex-Inspector Cites Early Role of C.I.A. On U.N. Arms Team

"...Scott Ritter, said in a new book that he and a senior C.I.A. official had planned some of the largest and most complex inspections undertaken by the United Nations, and that the United Nations inspection teams had included "C.I.A. paramilitary covert operators.

"He said a coup attempt against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq in June 1996 coincided with the presence of an inspection team that included nine C.I.A. officials "

Contrast with Bush on the eve of the invasion:

"We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq. Our good faith has not been returned."

Posted by Andy | November 14, 2006 3:54 PM

an advanced Iraqi nuclear program, had there actually been both an advanced Iraqi nuclear program and a US administration genuinely concerned about it, there almost certainly wouldn't have been a war.

Yes.

And it's much simpler than you describe it. Cf. North Korea, for example: if Iraq had nukes, we would have been afraid to go to war with them!

Before the war, I remember having debates with folks who thought we needed to go to war with Iraq to "send a message". Aside from quoting Woody Allen in response to whether literature ought to have a message -- "if you want to send a message use Western Union" [not anymore, I guess] -- I questioned the message we would have sent:

Look [I said] we don't know whether Iraq really has WMDs [at the time we everyday Joes didn't know either way], but NK certainly does -- if we invade Iraq but not NK, the latter would be suicidal so we maybe shouldn't, wouldn't that send the message that "if you are gonna be a dictator perceived to have WMDs, you better actually have them"? And is that the message we want to send?

Well ... we did send that message, and Iran got it loud and clear (FWIW, I wouldn't be too sure if they really have a WMD program -- they just wanna scare Bush & CO by pretending they have one solid enough to avoid invasion by us).

In general, anti-war types like (humbly he says) myself have been, to adapt Judy Miller, "proved f$*@ing right". So how come the public discourse considers us unserious about national defense and those who were wrong serious? I guess the push to teach Intelligent Design makes sense now. If people understood Darwinian evolution, they'd understand that the tremendous selection pressure in the public discourse against those of us who were right, e.g. about the Iraq war, and in favor of those who were wrong, ensures us that the punditocracy, advisors and leaders all will be more and more wrong so long as the system evolves under its current selective pressures. But in wrong-ness, there is profit, so there is an interest in making sure people don't get it.

The hawks were "wrong for the right reasons"? Stuff it. If we wanna select for good leadership, we need to start selecting for people who'll get things, er, right ...

Posted by DAS | November 14, 2006 4:00 PM

I don't want to leave the issue general here. My point isn't about invasions. My point is about the horror that is George Bush and His Pals. I'll believe that George Bush invaded Iraq largely to gain traction for his domestic policies until I read otherwise in The Book of Life on Judgment Day. (His neo-con supporters may have had other motives: to help Israel, to stitch Genius on their beanies, etc.) A moral horror unequaled in our history. To draw a lesson about future invasions from a unique conjunction of hoors is hopefully not useful.

Wolfowitz confessed almost immediately afterward that WMDs were just one of the reasons they went to war. It was just the one they could all agree on. Had WMDs not been an available "reason", they'd have ginned up something else. They all wanted THIS war. And, as we've learned, others. These guys just like wars.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 14, 2006 4:16 PM

My point isn't about invasions. My point is about the horror that is George Bush and His Pals.

Right. And that's exactly where Max Sawicky 9and I, for whatever it's worth) think you're wrong.

There's an anti-war view taht emphasises the exceptional nature of the Iraq war. That's you and, it seems, most of the commenters here. And tehre's an anti-war view that emphasizes the continuieties between Iraq and prior foreign policy.

One of the lessons of Vietnam, I would think, is that it doesn't take a W.-grade moron to get us into an unwinnable, immoral war. The best and the brightest can do it too.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 14, 2006 4:33 PM

I think david mizner has it right. The Bush administration thought they could wave the nuke threat and hoped they would find a few hundred tons of chemical weapons as a consolation prize. The military expected it to be used on them, but knew inherently that it would not hurt too much. Recommend this book "Where Are the WMDs?" for a more in depth discussion on the topic.

Posted by Jason Sigger | November 14, 2006 5:30 PM

Contra some of my ideological brethren, I find it hard to imagine that Bush and friends actually "knew" there were no WMDs. Certainly, we've read lots of quotes from Clinton et al to the effect that everyone had a preexisting assumption that Saddam still had WMDs. Concluding that Bush knew otherwise requires us to assume that his administration actually looked at the empirical evidence and the facts on the ground and revised their original assumptions. While this might be how most humans operate, let's just say it hasn't exactly been SOP for the Bush Administration.

Posted by Steve | November 14, 2006 5:52 PM

Don't forget also that this all arose against the backdrop of Dick Cheney's bureaucratic war against the CIA, which had failed to discover how far along Saddam's nuclear program was before the 1991 war, and which Cheney liked/trusted not at all. Hence, Cheney's top ally Rumsfeld takes the helm at the Pentagon and they continue their project (interrupted by 8 years of Clinton) to consolidate control over intelligence gathering and covert operations in the Defense Department.

Cheney thought there would be WMD as a matter of faith, based on his best hunch and on his intense distrust of the CIA, as much as anything else. With Cheney as a strong driving force for war with direct access to the Oval Office, for his own reasons that still remain somewhat obscure, everybody else that wanted war for their own reasons (Rumsfeld's military transformation agenda, Wolfowitz & the neocons' other tranformative fantasy agendas) got to follow along in the slipstream. Hence, Wolfowitz's comment as mentioned by Jeffrey, that WMDs was just the bureacratic reason for war everyone could agree on in public.

Posted by dave | November 14, 2006 5:57 PM

Dave:

Don't forget also that this all arose against the backdrop of Dick Cheney's bureaucratic war against the CIA, which had failed to discover how far along Saddam's nuclear program was before the 1991 war, and which Cheney liked/trusted not at all.

Interestingly, this is yet another piece of received Washington wisdom that turns out to be completely wrong. (I'm not blaming Dave for being wrong; you hear it all the time.)

In fact, there were U.S. analysts who were sounding the alarm very loudly about Iraq's nuclear program. Among other things, it was known Saudi Arabia was funding it to the turn of about $6 billion, which will buy you a lot. But the Reagan and Bush I administrations (including Cheney and, I would guess, Gates), leaned on the analysts to hush this up back when Saddam was our friend.

Then he stopped being our friend, and immediately the truth became the right story. So before the war you had Cheney (as Secretary of Defense) saying this:

There are a lot of estimates. They range through--worst case assumption, a matter of a year or less to having some kind of a crude device, to one to five to ten years in terms of having a deliverable weapon.

This turned out, in fact, to be just about right in all aspects.

Anyway, it's a great gig for Cheney et al: cook intelligence numerous times on the same country in exactly opposite directions, and get the result you want both times.

Posted by Jon | November 14, 2006 6:29 PM

re: whether or not Bush/Cheney "knew" there were no WMDs:

I concede that it is by no means settled that they did. In fact I would go so far as to say that there is no evidence proving this definitively. However, there are several reasons to believe that they they at least suspected the absence of WMDs.

First, they felt the need to set up the Office of Special Plans. If the consensus of the intelligence community was so strongly settled, why would they need to go around them? Why not just present the evidence for WMDs as the IC saw it?

Secondly, it was pretty clear there was some interagency sniping going on. I can't remember who it was giving the speech (Condi I think), but a senior official presented the DoE/aluminum tubes controversy as follows. "Some believe these tubes are evidence of a nuclear program. Some, including Saddam Hussein[,INR, and the DoE], disagree" This indicates that the WMD intelligence was not as one sided as some presented it at the time.

Also, as I mentioned above, Cheney questioned the efficacy of inspections even before they had failed to find WMDs. If he were so certain that there were big piles of anthrax and plutonium just waiting to be found, why would he attempt to discredit those who would be doing the finding?

Finally, there is the fact that months of inspections did not in fact find any WMD. Perhaps Bush had internalized all of the rhetoric about the difficulty of finding WMDs in a country "the size of California", but Cheney is a smart man, and I've never seen evidence of him buying his own BS.

All of this is speculation, but IMO Cheney knew very well what the U.S. Army would or wouldn't find. Bush, I believe, has a capacity to believe whatever he finds convenient with a passionate certainty, so that the actual existence of the WMDs was irrelevant to his position.

Like I said, all speculative, so I wouldn't blame anybody for going either way on this one.

Posted by foolishmortal | November 14, 2006 7:55 PM

Here's the thing that drove me crazy during the run-up to the war: I Saddam actually had Chem or Bio or nuclear weapons, how were we going to secure them when his government collapsed? During the post invasion chaos would have been the perfect time for al-Qaeda operatives to grab some Sarin or anthrax.

An invasion under those circumstances would have been precisely the worst thing to do.

Posted by DanMD | November 14, 2006 8:35 PM

I also think you'd have to call a duly authorized war designed to enforce bona fide cease-fire terms of an earlier war that was, in turn, duly authorized by the UN in response to an Iraqi breach of the norm against conquering your neighbors a non-imperialist military venture.

Wow, that's a difficult clause to read.

Posted by dj moonbat | November 14, 2006 9:09 PM

You don't tout "Mr Frostee" trucks as bio weapons labs before the UN if you've got better intelligence.

You don't twist rocket bodies into centrifuge parts if you've got better intelligence.

You don't squeeze obviously forged documents into intelligence if you've got better.

You don't say "wait till next time" with a straight face after the 100th or so failure of the inspectors.

You don't ignore what you know about chemical weapons degradation if you've got better.

You don't fluff biologics as a theater weapon when you know it's a crock.

Look at what Bush&Co sold as solid. Yes, they're ijuts, but they're not THAT ijiotic.

Look at the number of repetitions of bogus conjunctions in public speeches by Bush.

It was a self-conscious, methodical, deliberate con job. No doubt about it.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 14, 2006 9:45 PM

Andy:
Here's where I go into tin foil hat territory, because I've never been able to adequately convince anyone to take this part seriously - but here goes. Assume that, in fact, the CIA was using UNSCOM cover to spy on Saddam at least in the 1997-1998 timeframe. Now remember, all the reports of Iraqi WMDs that Bush relied upon in 2002, and which he basically said that the world agreed with him, were based upon these 1998 UNSCOM reports. But if in 1998 the UNSCOM team was currupted by CIA infiltration and had a least a partial purpose of a spy mission, wouldn't it make sense that the UNSCOM reports had an incentive to overstate the presence of WMDs so as to ensure further and continued UNSCOM/CIA unfettered access to Iraqi facilities?

Why is that tinfoil hat territory? The US was continuously overstating Iraqi capacities starting at least as early as 1990, and arguably earlier.

Which is why I agree Jeffrey's argument is dead wrong. There is no particular reason the Bush crowd is uniquely suspect. The Inside-the-Beltway crowd decided Saddam was bad and decided to get him, after they had originally decided Iran was bad and decided to get them using Iraq. And so on. We've had ahold of the tarbaby all along, it's just that it took a way to get really good and covered.

It applies to other invasions precidely because the tendency is ALWAYS to overstate the situation with a given foreign power, ALWAYS to overdramatize how dangerous a given threat is, and so on. So we're always getting involved; I believe we should get involved a lot less of the time.

Matthew:
What's more, though I know the more serious anti-interventionists of the world will disagree with me, I also think you'd have to call a duly authorized war designed to enforce bona fide cease-fire terms of an earlier war that was, in turn, duly authorized by the UN in response to an Iraqi breach of the norm against conquering your neighbors a non-imperialist military venture.

Wha? Lemme hack that sentence up.

What's more (though I know the more serious anti-interventionists of the world will disagree with me), I also think you'd have to call a duly authorized war (designed to enforce bona fide cease-fire terms of an earlier war (that was, in turn, duly authorized by the UN in response to an Iraqi breach of the norm against conquering your neighbors)) a non-imperialist military venture.

Oh. No, that circumstance wouldn't be, I'd agree, excepting that the entire enterprise, starting way back with the post-Iranian Revolution WAS imperialist, in the sense we were fighting the cold war, and that whole 'owning the oil' thing got tacked onto the agenda.

Which is how it works: first you've got to get involved for strategic reasons, and then you've got to protect somebody, and then it's a humanitarian intervention, and pretty soon you're bogged down building useless schools, and granting titles to proconsuls.

max
['It isn't worth the candle. India wasn't worth it to the British. They did it anyways.']

Posted by max | November 15, 2006 1:19 AM

"Why is that tinfoil hat territory? The US was continuously overstating Iraqi capacities starting at least as early as 1990, and arguably earlier."

That is demonstrably false. While it is true that the pre-Gulf War strength of the Iraqi conventional weapons programs were dramatically inflated, the Iraqi nuclear program was underestimated. When the inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the Gulf War, they were stunned at the progress Iraq had made toward an atomic bomb. They had originally thought Iraq was using centrifuges merely to enrich uranium for research, and would need different equipment to go into large scale production. They were wrong. This underestimation fueled later paranoia about Iraq. We never stopped believing that we were underestimating their capabilities.

Posted by Njorl | November 15, 2006 9:23 AM

It's hopeless. There's an absolute unwillingness to even engage with the idea that the failures of the Iraq war reflect on anything but the Bush administration. It's not that commenters here don't agree that prior administrations behaved roughly the same way, with roughly the same conseuqences. It's that they can't process the the idea at all.

Come 2009, they (tho not, one hopes, MY himself) will be cheering on the invasion of Iran/Syria/Sudan/Uzbekistan/Burma with every bit as much enthusiasm as the NRO crowd cheered for Iraq.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 15, 2006 9:28 AM

There's an absolute unwillingness to even engage with the idea that the failures of the Iraq war reflect on anything but the Bush administration.

Maybe it's because Clinton, acting on the same information (the contrary premise) stopped well short of war. And maybe it's because Bush had decided in 1999 (from a biography written by a friend) to be a war president to help his domestic agenda.

Iraq and its attendant issues simply became the occasion of the war. The issues didn't bring it about. The cause was Bush's desire and willingness to use a foreign war to aid a domestic agenda. Yes, there were others who had urged the same war based on actual events and threats, but without Bush's eagerness for generic war, they would have never gotten beyond the indignant letter and impassioned essay stage. Bush mouthed their concerns, but he was just filling up a balloon in a cartoon that someone else had inked in earlier. (Frum, his axis-of-evil speech writer, says this about him.)

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 15, 2006 9:38 AM

You counterfactual considers only a WMD program not WMDs. I think this is a key distinction.

Let's say that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq . There is no reason to be confident the inspectors would have found them. They are not hard to hide provided one is willing to expose civilians to terrible risks as Saddam Hussein clearly was. It is the security and decontamination measures which sane WMD deployers insist on that are easy to detect.

One of the main reasons I opposed the invasion (the other being the risk of civil war) is that I thought that
1) there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq.
2)they were not a danger so long as Saddam Hussein knew that we would invade if any were used by anyone anywhere (that is knew we would invade if any such weapons were used and it could not be proven that they weren't from Iraq.
3) They woult not be secured promptly if there were an invasion (I assumed it was impossible I wasn't even thinking of the gross incompetence amounting to depraved indifference which occured)
4) some would end up in the hands of terorists (with hindsight is there any way to doubt that this would have happened)
5) WMD in Iraq would kill lots of people if and only if we invaded.

When I learned there were no WMD in Iraq (and they tore the statue down and stuff). I was briefly convinced that my opposition to the invasion was a mistake (briefly means hours not days).

see what I wrote here http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/2003_03_09_rjwaldmann_archive.html
"I think invading Iraq because there is anthrax there is roughly like shooting missiles at the old USSR because they had missiles. I think, in this case as in that, first strike won’t work, and deterrence has a better chance of working."
and look at the date stamp on that baby.

Invading Iraq which contained no WMD bad. Invading Iraq which contains WMD much much worse.

Posted by Robert Waldmann | November 15, 2006 11:47 AM

Concluding that Bush knew otherwise requires us to assume that his administration actually looked at the empirical evidence and the facts on the ground and revised their original assumptions. While this might be how most humans operate, let's just say it hasn't exactly been SOP for the Bush Administration.

This is not, how most humans operate. Most humans tend to believe things first, and then try to find evidence to support their beliefs. So the Administration is very human in this. The problem with that is that good decision-makers are supposed to realize that this is how humans operate, and therefore make every effort to avoid this tendency. This is why you are supposed to rely on non-partisan, impartial agencies, and not hand-pick shops of yes-men to tell you what you want to hear.

In any event, Max is right. The debate on the war at this point seems to be an argument over implementation and casus belli, and not whether or not it was a good idea in the first place. The whole thing that bothers me about the "thank God Rummy's gone" line of attack is the unstated assumption that, had someone more competent been in the job, this would have all turned out okay and everything would be right. But the fact of the matter is this: going to war was both a strategic blunder (because it took the heat off of the people who actually attacked us) and a moral wrong.

Posted by josephdietrich | November 15, 2006 4:01 PM

A quick perspective from the UK -

One thing that stands out from your post, Matt, is the constant reference to a nuclear war. However, nukes were never mentioned by Tony Blair as part of the case for WMD. There was a lot of noise about "chemical and biological weapons" capable of deployment "within 45 minutes"... but the accusation that Saddam was buying uranium from Africa was, I think, debunked pretty quickly and largely outside the our debates in 2003 and beyond.

So the "what if..." questions you debate look slightly odd from this side of the pond.

Posted by Robert | November 17, 2006 10:52 AM