Let's dispatch with the nonsense that the coalition's failure thus far to find Iraq's fabled weapons of mass destruction calls into question the Anglo-American rationale for ousting Saddam Hussein. All political leaders – Democratic or Republican, Labor or Tory, Labor or Likud – must rely on the best estimates of their intelligence services in their national-security decision making. The intelligence upon which US President George W. Bush relied was the same intelligence that led former president Bill Clinton to order four days of air strikes on Iraq in December 1998.
It was the same intelligence both Germany and France – famous opponents of the war – had at their disposal. Indeed, according to last week's congressional testimony by former US weapons inspector David Kay, it was what Saddam Hussein believed. If there was deceit, it was neither in Blair's "dodgy dossier" nor in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, but somewhere in the middle-to-higher reaches of Iraq's own scientific establishment.
Doubtless, it would behoove both the British and American intelligence services to start asking some hard questions of themselves as to why they apparently got it wrong. But intelligence failures do not equal political failures, a distinction partisan critics of Blair and Bush ought to bear in mind pending their own eventual return to power.
As it is, the decision to go to war was not based on WMDs alone. One reason the issue became prominent in the pre-war debate is that most outstanding Security Council resolutions on Iraq dealt with its WMD programs. In an interview last year with Vanity Fair, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz noted other reasons the administration wanted Saddam gone, including his support for terrorism and "the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." WMDs were stressed, Wolfowitz said, because it was "the one issue that everyone could agree on." By "everyone," the deputy secretary meant US government agencies, but he may as well have added the UN.
In other words, insofar as Bush and Blair were pressured by critics to go "the UN route," as they indeed did, they were bound to play the WMD issue over and above the others. Yet, in private musings, the humanitarian imperative of liberating Iraq from tyranny was clearly a consideration.
Here's Blair, talking to British journalist Peter Stothard, on March 14, 2003: "What amazes me is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can, you should."
So much, then, for allegations of high-level deceit. Yet the issue doesn't end there. The need to overthrow Saddam went well beyond the strategic threat he posed his neighbors and the world. Rather, it had to do with the symbolic threat he posed.
The symbolism was twofold: first, it was the symbolism of an Arab potentate who could say no to the United States without consequence. And second, it was the symbolism of a United States that would tolerate being defied. This combination fueled dangerous illusions in the Arab world, illusions that were at the heart of Osama bin Laden's message to his followers: We are, in fact, strong; they are, in fact, weak; our will is everything. It is this illusion that, after September 11, had to be dispelled by the US at all costs.
What mattered in the war on Iraq, then, has little to do with whether WMDs existed and are found. What counted was that, by rapidly destroying Iraq's war machine, and by capturing and humiliating Saddam, the US deflated this particular Arab fantasy of strength and defiance.
The war on terrorism will not be won until terrorists and their fellow-travelers, particularly in the Arab world, have their faces rubbed in the failure of their strategy, their methods, their ideals. The war in Iraq has already been justified on many grounds. But as a front in the war on terrorism, its success will not be assured until America demonstrates that it can more than afford the the toll terrorists can exact in American lives.
