In his new memoir "Points of Decision," former President George W. Bush says "No one was more shocked or angry than when we didn't find the weapons (of mass destruction)." For my part, I believe him. I think that based on the evidence at the time, it was logical to believe that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, but that this was not a sufficient reason to invade Iraq.
What We Knew
While a lot has been made of inflated intelligence reports or even outright prevarication, there were certain facts which were undisputable in 2003:
1. The Hussein regime had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran on multiple occasions the war with Iran in 1980-1988.
2. In 1991, Iraq invaded Kuwait without justification.
3. During the Gulf War, Iraq fired missiles into Israel.
4. When the U.N. forces invaded Iraq in 1991, they found and destroyed a large chemical weapons complex. In a terrible irony, Hussein did not use chemical weapons against the invading multi-national forces, but hundreds of thousands of troops were exposed to chemical agents when the Kamisihah stockpile was destroyed.
5. After U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they were not allowed to return until shortly before the war. Thus, Saddam had four years in which to replenish his stocks of chemical weapons without oversight.
It seems logical to conclude that an unstable dictator with a history of unprovoked attacks on other countries and who had possessed and used chemical weapons in the past and was refusing to allow third parties to monitor his compliance with U.N. disarmament resolutions was up to no good. However, Saddam Hussein was not logical. After his capture, he stated that he had used the bluff of having weapons of mass destruction to deter Iran from attacking. However, he assumed that the U.S. intelligence had thoroughly infiltrated his government and would know that he didn't really possess the weapons. That turned out to be a bad bluff for him.
Why It Didn't Make Sense to Invade Iraq
So, if Saddam Hussein gave us every reason to believe that he had chemical weapons, why shouldn't we have invaded? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have given us an object lesson that war is an ugly, unpredictable thing. In war, decent people are ordered to perform indecent acts. It is an inevitable consequence of war that civilians are killed and atrocities are committed, even by the good guys. In fact, this was true to a much greater extent during World War II, but was accepted due to the much greater threat that was posed.
Since war inevitably dehumanizes us, it should be pursued as an absolute last resort. It should have been apparent that war was not the last resort in 2003.
We did not have incontrovertible proof that Saddam was planning to use weapons of mass destruction. If we knew that Saddam was planning a nuclear strike on Israel, we would have had a moral imperative to stop that act by any means possible. However, we did not have absolute proof (as opposed to simply logical proof) that Saddam intended to use weapons of mass destruction. While Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons in the past, he notably did not employ them against U.N. troops in 1991.
Further, he was not taking steps to expand during 1998-2003. Before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he reoccupied the Rhineland, annexed the Sudetenland and added Austria to Germany's territory. These were the points when the allies should have stepped in. However, in 2003, Saddam Hussein was not even in control of all of his country, since large portions constituted no fly zones.
Saddam Hussein was a brutal and inhuman dictator who posed a grave threat to his own populace. However, he did not pose a threat to the security of the United States. While preventing the slaughter of innocents at the hands of homicidal maniac is and was a laudable goal, an invasion was not the right means to accomplish it. As I said before, war dehumanizes us. You cannot achieve a humanitarian result by dehumanizing means, or, to put it another way, you can't save innocent human life by taking innocent human life. That's why what we did was wrong.
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