A rchive Date
[ 15-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goldstein_may13.html
Finding Iraq's weapons is important
Otherwise, the world will conclude the Bush administration was either incompetent, or lying
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN - Toronto Sun
May 13, 2003
Actually, it does matter whether the United States finds weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq - especially for those of us who supported this war in the first place.
Disarming Saddam Hussein of WMD - not liberating Iraq - was the primary reason given for this war by U.S. President George Bush and British PM Tony Blair.
It was also their most convincing argument for launching a pre-emptive strike, without UN Security Council approval.
While it was dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeatedly argued it was the unique threat posed by Saddam Hussein that justified war.
First, that Saddam possessed WMD and had used them in the past, even against his own people.
Second, that Saddam supported terrorism, had links with al-Qaida, and had funded the families of Palestinian suicide/homicide bombers.
Third, that the combination of these two factors meant Saddam had both the will and the means to supply WMD to terrorists, creating a potential horror that would make even 9/11 pale by comparison. Thus, launching a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was actually a form of self-defence.
Fourth, and finally, since UN weapons inspectors were clearly being deceived by Saddam, it was time to end his flaunting of 12 years of Security Council resolutions demanding he disarm, dating back to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Writing in the New York Times recently, Thomas Friedman eloquently made the case - gaining increasing popularity among war supporters in the absence of any WMD finds to date - that Saddam's atrocities alone justified war.
Referring to a front-page picture in the Times showing a human skull, one of Saddam's countless anonymous victims, Friedman observed: "As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken." True, but beside the point.
Never-ending list
If invading brutal regimes was enough to justify pre-emptive war, the list would be never-ending. The U.S. even supports some of those regimes. But the reason it gave for going to war in Iraq was to disarm it of thousands of gallons of unaccounted for anthrax and thousands of tons of VX nerve gas, botulinin, ricin, Sarin and mustard gas, along with the capabilities to develop and deliver them. (Technically, it was also to disarm Iraq of any nuclear weapons, although by the time of the war, chemical and biological weapons were the real concerns.)
I'm not an America-basher, who, as one commentator aptly put it - having been proven wrong in every dire prediction they made about the conduct of the war itself - now sound like kids in the back seat of the car on a family vacation, chanting "are we there yet, are we there yet?" as they demand instant proof of Iraq's WMD. These hypocrites, who were willing to give chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix "months" to find WMD, now demand the U.S. produce proof barely a month after Saddam's statue was toppled in Baghdad's main square and just weeks after the fighting ended, while all sorts of other priorities, such as restoring civil order, remain.
If and when WMD are found, these same critics will denounce it as a CIA plant, even though it is the U.S. military which has reported, each time a suspected WMD find has been made, that further testing proved negative.
In Sunday's Washington Post there was a huge piece by Barton Gellman, who spent a week with the main group hunting for WMD, Task Force 75, hardly an indication there's a coverup going on. Indeed, quite the reverse.
While Gellman noted that "even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find evidence of banned weapons," most of his article reported on the frustrations of task force members at having come up empty so far at what were thought to be the prime WMD sites.
Task Force 75 is now winding down its operations in preparation for turning over the search to a larger organization known as the Iraq Survey Group. But it will also be focusing on other issues, such as Saddam's crimes against humanity.
Task Force members said their biggest frustration has been that looters got to almost every sensitive site long before they did, stripping and burning them of potential clues.
In the weeks since the war ended, we've also heard the explanation that Saddam had years to hide his WMD and that finding them will take time, that some weapons may have been hidden in Syria (or Iran) and that in any event, it was Saddam's obligation to prove he didn't have WMD and to co-operate with UN inspectors, which he clearly failed to do.
But the bottom line remains that for the sake of American - and Bush's - credibility, evidence of Iraq's WMD program must be found, or the inevitable conclusion will be, at best, that U.S. intelligence gathering was incompetent, and at worst, that the Bush administration lied to provoke a war.
Even those of us who supported this war can't ignore that.
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com. Or visit his home page. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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