Lewis Lapham, who is to essayists what Godzilla is to lizards, has a brutally intelligent piece about all this in the current Harpers. A quote from Michael Ledeen, who is described as "resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (which would seem to suggest a political stance just to the left of Nicholas II). To wit:
“Every ten years or so the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show that we mean business”.
about a story regarding GeeDubya mistating the nature of an IAEA report. “Published” on MSNBC, it utterly vanished a few hours later. Dat ol’ debbil libruhl media, again.
Give me half an hour, I can clean my kitchen. Give me 10 seconds to clean a hotel kitchen, not a chance. If you can’t see the difference between Iraq getting rid of stuff over the course of a few years between 1991 and 1998, and getting rid of what, according to the United States, was a MUCH LARGER collection of WMDs in a span of a few weeks, I’m not sure what to say to explain it.
Quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. The United States STARTED THE WAR, based on specific claims. They said they have specific, unambiguous, but secret evidence that proved it. If they cannot back those claims up with the objective evidence they claimed to have, they’re liars and warmongers. It’s the job of the country starting the war to show why it has to be started.
It’s real simple: Put up or shut up. Where are they?
I don’t know. You tell me. You’re the one who still thinks Bush wasn’t lying, even though he WAS lying about Nigerian uranium, aluminum rods, nonexistent reports… I guess you think that although he was lying about that stuff, he was telling the truth about the “thousands on tons” of WMDs. Fine. Put up or shut up. Let’s see them.
The onus of proof’s on the people who started this war and chose to set into motion events that killed thousands of people… and in here, on the people who support them. I don’t need a reason to NOT support war.
I’m from Missouri on this issue. Put up or shut up. It’s that simple. Let’s see all that evidence we were promised.
We started the war because we had a large standing army, something never envisioned when the country was founded:
“Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.”
George Washington’s Farewell Address
To a man with a hammer, all the world’s problems look like nails. To a President with a large military at his beck and call, forgetting the Constitution comes easy:
“I’m the one who decides that, not you.”
George Bush to a reporter, when asked about the then pending war on Iraq
You are mistaken, adher. Hans Blix and his inspectors only arrived in Iraq in November of 2002; prior to that, there had been no inspectors in Iraq since December 1998:
Iraq claimed a certain amount, much of which was never accounted for. Inspectors after leaving in 1998 said there was a still a lot of stuff left. Intelligence agencies from around the world agreed that Hussein still had WMD.
Even anti-war activists admitted he had them. The argument was not whether he had or didn’t have WMD, it was whether or not he was a threat.
The threat implied that he had WMD and was potentially going to give them to terrorists. While i personally think he did have weapons, i beleive they are rotting in the desert like they have been for years. However, it was up to the Bush Administration to prove that he had weapons that were readily capable of reaching terrorists hands. Bush and Co. claimed to know where Saddam was making weapons, none of which have tested positive. WMD were not used on US troops during the final days. What Bush has succeeded in doing was throw Iraq into Chaos, and make it easier for terrorists to get the WMD by breakdown in the security of Iraq. (i shall ignore the invasion=more terrorists argument for now). The threat is greater now than it was before, as potential terrorists are less likely to run into resistance while trying to procure such weapons.
This strikes me as an accurate statement of the Administration’s dilemma. (Whether they’ll be effectively called on it is a different question). At this stage, whether something (a bunch of spanking-new weaponized WMD, or, as appears most plausible at this stage, a modicum of precursors or old stuff) turns up buried somewhere, the key conjunction of facts relevant to the justification, ab initio, for war strikes me as:
(a) GWB’s (read: GWB + his helpers) repeated contention not just that some technically-violative quantity of “banned weapons” existed, but that it was a lot, it was ready for delivery, and it was likely to be imminently used against the U.S. or “our friends and allies” by an unstable/irrational/purely evil Saddam regime; and
(b) the fact that no such weapons (even assuming they exist) were deployed during the course of the U.S. threatening, invading, and destroying the unstable/irrational/purely evil regime.
Factually, I just don’t know that the U.S. populace (and certainly not the “coalition” populace or the “international community,” whatever that may be) would have approved a war explicitly premised as “he’s got some nasty weapons, that he’ll probably never use because it would be suicidal and universally condemned, but nevertheless we can eventually, someday, catch him dead to rights in a “gotcha” technical violation of a “UN mandate” that he “agreed to” under duress.” If nothing else, every country worth its salt (U.S. included) possesses nasty weapons that could kill thousands/millions; but when they’re demonstrably too prudent to use them, no one’s willing to invade those countries just to punish passive stockpiling of such stuff.
I don’t know that either the “pro” or “anti” war crowds really do their causes a service by focusing, at this point, on whether a mayonnaise jar, or a whole bunker, of concedely unused weapons turns up at this point. Unused, and not-to-be-used, weapons, were not the ostensible casus belli.
Actually, I’m praying that the President is right. I’d like to think that we had even a little justificatiion for sacrificing brave Americans, killing innocent Iraqis, turning world opinion against us, damaging relationships with our allies, setting a dangerous precedent of “pre-emption” and making it easier to recruit terrorists.