Babylon Revisited

Since Ilana Mercer, with whom I have a friendly and respectful relationship, has seen fit to describe my comment at her site about WMDs as “Hannity inanities” and other such epithets, suggesting that only blind unthinking partisans of the administration believed there were WMDs in Iraq, I will not reply directly at her. (Also, Ilana, with whom I’ve had numerous e-mail exchanges over the last two or three years, misspells my first name as “Laurence”, which makes one wonder how reliable is her memory of the WMD debate.) However, here is an exchange with a reader in which I address the issue further.

A reader wrote:

Hi. At Ilana Mercer’s blog I happened to see your remark that “the whole world, including those opposing the war, believed Iraq had WMDs, and there was ample reason for that belief.” This is a claim I see periodically, sometimes in the form that all the world’s intelligence agencies believed there were Iraqi WMDs. I think there was a prevailing presumption, at least in the West, that the WMDs existed, but there were definitely people who said they weren’t there: Scott Ritter, people who believed Iraq was already a wreck thanks to sanctions, and people who disbelieved the claim apparently on the principle that anything the U.S. government says repeatedly must be a lie (I think I have met several of these, all holding some “grand deception” theory about how the world is run).

But how would you defend your proposition? Is there a particular piece of evidence you could point to? I would especially be interested in evidence that intelligence agencies outside the English-speaking world believed in Iraqi WMDs, but that may not be what you had in mind.

LA somewhat impatiently replies:

May I respectfully ask what planet you were dwelling on from 2002 to 2004? Are you telling me you have no memory, no familiarity with the debate and with things that have been said a thousand times, and you need me to repeat them?

The reader writes back courteously:

During those years, I simply didn’t pay much attention to the WMD skeptics, or to views from countries outside the USA. (I’m not American, incidentally, but most of the punditry I read was.) I was interested in understanding the actual military balance between Iraq and the USA, not the exact distribution of views about Iraq’s military-cum-terrorist potential. So it’s possible that there were more skeptics than I realized, and that quite different views prevailed in other countries.

LA, mollified, replies:

Well according to Ilana Mercer, there were lots of skeptics. But I lived through the debate too. The parties most strongly opposing the war, such as France and Germany and the British left, such as the UN, did not do so on on the basis that there were no WMDs. They did it on the basis that we needed more time to let inspections find the WMDs.

Obviously given the passions against the war at the time and the global hatred and smearing of Bush, if the war opponents believed that the WMD belief was false, they would have shouted that to the heavens. They did not. The anti-war left and anti-war right in the U.S. did not say there were no WMD (though a few articles here and there may have used that argument, I don’t remember). Their overwhelming emphasis was on attacking Bush and the neocons for trying to spread a U.S. empire, for launching a war that was “really” only for Israel and oil. A big argument they used was, not that Iraq did not have WMDs, but that the secular Baathist regime of Iraq would never give its WMDs to Al Qaeda.

You don’t need access to top intelligence secrets to understand this. It was known as a fact in the ‘90s that Iraq possessed various WMDs. Up to 1988 Iraq had had a nuclear reactor in the works until Israel destroyed it. There was no reason to believe that such a regime had suddenly stopped pursuing WMDs. And Hussein’s conduct was clearly the conduct of a leader concealing something.

The case for Iraqi WMDs was therefore more a “common sense” argument than an argument based on hard evidence or human intelligence. Powell says he regrets his UN testimony of February 2003. But in fact he has not renounced everything he said in that speech, e.g., the massive evidence of communications within Iraq of ongoing concealment from the inspectors. Resolution 1441 said, “Iraq must be absolutely forthcoming, or there will be war.” Iraq was not forthcoming, but continued the pattern of concealment and deception. So Hussein certainly behaved, in the eyes of any common sense observer, like a leader possessing WMDs.

Reader replies:

Well, everything you say seems sensible, I think you’ve answered my question fairly. I may as well confess that I’m a diehard who thinks that Iraq sponsored 9/11, that the anthrax letters were part of that attack, and that there has been a huge coverup. I have spent far more time fine-tuning that theory than trying to grasp the public dynamics of the path to war, but on occasion I like to recalibrate my understanding of what everyone else thinks.

Ben writes:

Well according to Ilana Mercer, there were lots of skeptics.

No there weren’t, I was glued to talk radio and the Internet from 2001 to 2003 and it’s exactly as Mr. Auster said it was The argument against the war from the left was George Bush was a warmonger, he was doing this for Cheney and Halliburton, it was for oil, war is always bad, and other typical platitudes given by the far left, but very few people said there we’re no WMDs in Iraq. Pat Buchanan and his ilk were against the war in Iraq for the very things that are happening now such as being bogged down in nation building but the anti war conservatives never said there were no WMDs. Most of the world was calling for more time and inspections and they also did not say there were no WMDs.

I do remember Scott Ritter as being one who denied the existence of WMD but I also think he was all over the map and not consistent if I remember correctly. I also remember Scott losing credibility due to some kind of scandal with an under age girl or something? ( I can’t remember all the details) Other then him I couldn’t name anymore that are mainstream. [LA adds: Ritter was a discredited figure. He went to Iraq and gave public statements in Iraq denouncing the U.S. government.] Maybe some shadowy blogs out there were saying it but it wasn’t a mainstream argument coming from the world nor any party. Sure it’s easy to say there were no WMDs now, that only dumb idiots believed their were WMDs being a Monday morning quarterback but that surely was not the case then.

I also resent this attitude (which I see a lot of now) that anybody who thought there were WMDs or believed Bush (then) was an idiot, a Bushie, stupid, moron, etc. I believed Saddam had them too. What I’m angry about is, when it was discovered there were none, whether Saddam had none to begin with or moved them out of the country, we should have left, our interests were no longer threatened and we should have gotten out of there.

If we were going to stay we should have then decided on total victory, kicked out the liberal media embedded reporters who wished to see us lose and enacted more brutality and harshness to secure the country instead of feeling nothing but love for the Iraqi people and Islam. It should have been any means necessary to win after we decided to stay and secure the country. If Americans didn’t wish to do any means necessary and wished to continue reveling in their liberalism then we should have gotten the hell out of there.

Building schools and handing out candy to children is all good but do it after the country is secure. However, Bush changed the definition of the war to his right-liberal vision that we can look back in hindsight now and see that was his true goal.

This is why I get mad at conservatives now because they still act like this war is for our security when obviously it’s not. It’s for an unrealistic vision of the Islamic world, it’s for right-liberal utopian ideas. But during the buildup of the case for war Bush did make a strong case for it. Whether it was based on “lies” and such still remains to be seen. I think the only lie was acting like we were doing it for our security when it was really only about the neocon vision.

I agreed with Bush when he was making hawkish statements but the problem is he changed course and turned into the right-liberal wimp he is now. [LA notes: I would even say he’s become a left-liberal in key respects.] Now we understand that the hawkish statements were said in order to enact his wimpy liberalism since that defines who he is and a lot of us who didn’t understand that then, understand that now. At the time I really thought after 9/11 Bush really did want to protect America. The debate now is whether what people like me believed was true or false. But to say this debate was going on in 2001, 2002, 2003 etc. is totally false. Back then Bush’s approval rating was through the ceiling and the country for the most part was united. Looking at June 2006, it’s hard to imagine this was ever true.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2006 10:10 AM | Send