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Hypothetical second thoughts about the war
If it had been known before the war that Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of WMDs, but that he only had the potential capability to re-start production of WMDs at some future time after the sanctions regime had been abandoned; and if it had been known before the war that the U.S. would passively allow vast destructive looting to occur in the aftermath of the regime’s fall, and that in response to this horror the Secretary of Defense would off-handedly remark that such things are the price of “freedom”; and if it had been known before the war that the U.S. armed forces under the Bush administration would not actually defeat the enemy and gain actual control over Iraq, but rather would conduct a “liberal, humanitarian”-type war that would leave many of the enemy in a position to keep fighting our troops and mass murdering Iraqi civilians; and if it had known that our troops, rather than being assigned to destroy the enemy, would be placed in vulnerable positions in transport and guard duty where they could be continually blown up and shot at by the enemy; and if it had been known that the Bush administration would set about building a new democratic government in Iraq without having first defeated the enemy; and if it had been known that President Bush would define “victory” as the construction of an elected government, rather than as the destruction of the enemy’s ability to wage war against us and our Iraqi allies, then I would not have supported the war. I would have said, since Hussein does not now or in the near future have the capability of transferring WMDs to terrorist groups, and since the war being currently proposed by Bush will create such terrible unresolvable problems, we have to delay launching this war until we are prepared to wage it a way that will produce victory rather than an ongoing terror war from which we will not be able to extricate ourselves.
Of course, none of these hypotheticals obtained before the war. The whole world, including the most vociferous opponents of Bush’s planned invasion, believed that Hussein possessed vast WMD stocks; and no one knew or expected that Bush would carry out the war and the occupation the way that he has. Given our actual state of knowledge at the time, we did what we had to do in my opinion. My point is to take cognizance of all the things we now know (or, in the case of the non-existence of WMDs, apparently know), and to lay out the logic resulting from that. Email entry |