Ok, so it now seems certain and official that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Nor, it now seems, were there any of the actual WMD-related programmes that supporters of the war had retreated to. But Saddam did have the intention to try to re-acquire a WMD capability that he had successfully been disarmed of by UN inspectors following the first Gulf War, and that the UN sanction regime had successfully prevented him from restarting.
According to George Bush and Tony Blair, this doesn’t affect their judgement that the war was justified and correct. But what would have been the outcome if that had been the situation that had been presented to the world and to their domestic audiences at the time?
From the point of view of the UK, I think we can confidently say that if Tony Blair had based his argument for war on Saddam’s desire to acquire WMDs that there would never have been any UK forces in Iraq. As it was, over 90% of the population was against the war without a UN resolution and a million and a half people marched in London in opposition, the resolution of authority passed through Parliament only with the support of opposition parties and after much arm wrenching on wavering Labour MPs.
So, Blair gets voted down in Parliament and UK forces will not participate in any attack. How about in the US? How much support would Bush have for a war on those grounds and without British support? Would Congress have authorised the use of force and how much support would it have in the country?
I don’t think the American people would have supported the Bush administration as much, without the WMD plea. At the time the threat seemed immediate and action seemed to have to occur now.
WMD (esp wrt terrorist access) was the issue on which the administration could get a majority of Congress on board. Regime change would be a much tougher sell before the fact.
I would say yes. Before the war, I tried to explain to my cow-orkers (in Orange County, CA – “Reagan Country”) that war must be a last-resort option, and that the UN inspectors needed to be allowed to finish their jobs. One cow-orker said, “Well, when do you think we should attack? After Saddam drops nuclear bombs on us?” I tried to explain that Iraq did not have the ability to “drop nuclear bombs on us” and that the CIA reported that Saddam was not a threat to us unless he was provoked, but she wouldn’t buy it. Most people I talked to who were in favour of attacking Iraq were convinced that Iraq had WMDs (I thought he probably did, too), and that an attack was imminent unless we invaded (which I thought was not the case).
Only 1 senator voted against the going to war… and he was pretty brave. Once a crowd starts moving its hard to press in the opposite direction. Mob mentality.
As for British support it was good politically for Bush… but not a pre-requisite.
I was a pretty active protester before the invasion, and the buzz at anti-war protests was not “There are no WMD’s” (cause privately, even we thought there probably were) - but “Let the UN process take it’s course - use sanctions and world pressure before bombs near civilians.”
So yes, I think the majority of Americans did believe Bush and the media that there were WMDs in Iraq. Didn’t we sell them a bunch about 15 years ago? What happened to all of those? My understanding at the time was that the UN was looking for documentation that the weapons the US sold Saddam before the Gulf War had been destroyed, and that Saddam’s secretary lost the paperwork or something. The existence of weapons wasn’t really in question, because they had come from us! (Was I completely not understanding what was going on, or has the story changed?)
I would have fully supported a “Saddam’s a dreadful person who’s slaughtering his own people, madman crazy guy who’s torturing and doing icky stuff and must be stopped,” war. But considering the trouble our soldiers are having “liberating” all these oppressed people, I have to wonder how dreadful conditions really were under Saddam’s rule - more dreadful than under ours? I just wish I knew. I wish there was a source I could trust anymore.
I would not have. As deplorable a person as Saddam is, Iraq was a sovereign nation and we did not have the right to interfere in its internal politics.
I’m against the war… but the issue wasn’t as much sovereignty … but the urgency given by Bush. Nothing justified it back then to invade with so much haste and so little support. Politically this was the undoing of Bush.
IMO, if the picture painted by Bush and friends prior had been 100% accurate, then I would say the war was justified. As it is, it wasn’t even close and the war is a huge blunder and someone (read: Bush) must be held accountable.
There was a poll that showed somewhere in the neighborhood o 87% of Americasn thought that the case for war in Iraq involved an imminent threat.
The war was sold on the basis of defending the US. Without a threat, there’s not much need for defending yourself.
No. I don’t think we’ve sold WMDs to anyone. However, we did know that he had had WMDs and had used them in the Iran-Iraq war (and we did not make much of a fuss about it at the time…because we were more allied with Saddam than Iran).
What we were asking from them was documentary evidence showing what had happened to WMDs that we knew they had had at an earlier time and we did not have particular documentation or evidence for having been destroyed. They said that they had destroyed them but didn’t have documentary evidence of this. And, this was likely the truth, as we now know.
No doubt that Saddam is a dreadful person. However, it is not clear to me that there were really very many people being killed by him in the late 90s and early 00s. The largest number of deaths that Saddam is reponsible for are Kurds and Iranians. He hadn’t been fighting the Iranians for a long time and we had instituted the no-fly zones to protect the Kurds.
No doubt the regime remained oppressive and there were a few people likely being killed here and there, but as far as I understand it, there was no real humanitarian crisis…certainly not in comparison to lots of other places.
Saddam is evil – hey, get in line, we’ve got people like Mugabe and Kim Jong Il who are demonstrably eviler.
Fact of the matter is, the real reason the Bush admin went to war was that the neocons who do all the thinking for them were sure the House of Saud was going to be overthrown sooner rather than later, and they wanted to have a strategic base in the Middle East so they could keep the oil flowing. Iraq is nice and centrally located and has plenty of oil of its own. If they’d sold the war on those grounds, they would have been honest, but it’s unlikely it would have sold.
I agree that the House of Saud is none too stable, and that it would be good for us to have some means of projecting force in the region before Osama or someone very much like him gets his hands on the controls to the oil wells. I just don’t think war would be the way to go. Some diplomacy, negotiation and money in the right hands was all it would have taken. Kuwait, for example, is not likely to turn American troops away anytime soon.
If Bush had given truly accurate reasons for invading Iraq, the American populace would have replied, “No, George, invading Iraq to make your Texas oil croneys richer is not a good idea.”
Well, I’ll be damned. I knew that we looked the other way while he made and used these weapons back in the 80s but I had no idea we actually sold him the “dual use” materials to do so.
