Scandal

Yeah, it’s pretty bloody easy to win the scandal wars when only you have supboena power and you use it in a nakedly partisan way.

Erm, now I may be missing the wider point, but I thought one of the real big issues in the whole debate is that precisely *no* UN resolution “requiring war” had been agreed on. It was either inspections, or another resolution, which never came.

Sorry if I’m quibbling or just repeating the obvious but well, I just was a bit puzzled by that last phrase.

John,
You wrote (in the link you include in your piece) “The sites in the photos have been inspected and found to be innocuous.” Kenneth Pollack, in the June 28, 2004 issue of _The New Republic_, wrote, “The absence of an aggressive, threatening Iraqui WMD program … would have been extremely difficult to recognize … before the war. … There was a consensus among the governments of the world and a virtual consensus among the experts about the basic threat from Iraq; the great debate was over whether a war was necessary to remedy it. Few claimed that Iraq had no WMD programs … and they argued with less evidence than could be mustered in support of the mainstream position” (pg. 21). Now, in the link you include, you don’t deny that there might have been chemical weapons programs, and so your claim in that post isn’t necessarily at odds with what Pollack writes there. But I’m just wondering: is what Pollack writes correct? Was there a near consensus among experts about the existence of WMDs, and if so, did that consensus collapse during the UN inspections of 2003?

I blame it on selective amnesia. RR gave us the “I do not recall” mantra. Just keep repeating it until the problem goes away.

“Was there a near consensus among experts about the existence of WMDs”

I have seen the “consensus” analyzed to show why a German mid-level intelligence analyst, not having complete information, has nothing much to lose by saying “Well, Iraq probably has some WMD’s”, and being proved wrong.

Whereas if said analyst said “Iraq has none”, not only would he have had Rumsfeld and Cheney all over him to prove it, but if they had found any, his career would have been over. The incentives were all on one side. In other words, they were not wrong, they lied.
…
“no UN resolution “requiring war” had been agreed on”

The administration claims that the first resolution was adequate. This interpretation, hotly disputed, would assert that Syria voted yes on a possible war.

“In particular, it seems as if judgements about the threat posed by Saddam’s regime depended primarily on intelligence reports from places like Niger.”

No. Judgments were about Saddam’s desires–scary, and the interface of those desires with the unwillingness of the international community to commit to long-term containment policies. In early 2002–which is to say BEFORE inspectors went back in–France, Germany and Russia were trying to get sanctions lifted without linking it to any duty on Saddam’s part. So after 4 years of non-inspections, which had ended after Saddam had confined inspectors to their rooms for some time, the world community was willing to just pretend nothing had ever happened. I won’t apologize for wanting to get rid of Saddam instead of trusting the pathetic UN and the rest of the so-called international ‘community’ to contain him for the rest of his life. The Niger reports suggest that Saddam’s intentions never changed. The non-actions of the international community suggest that long term containment was impossible. And ‘non-actions’ is being generous. If the UN Luxurious Palaces-For-Oil thing is as it appears, they were actively undermining the effectiveness of containment.

France, Germany and Russia were trying to get sanctions lifted without linking it to any duty on Saddam’s part

Economic sanctions were killing thousands of Iraqis a month, and the US had belligerently suggested that they would only be lifted once Saddam was gone. In other words, no matter what Saddam did (short of stepping down), the sanctions would not be lifted.

In other words, Iraqis, including many children under 5, would continue to die due to a combination of inadequate food and medical supplies (and, arguably, the long-term effects of the depleted uranium munitions used in Gulf War I, and incidentally in all US-led wars since then.)

Which just goes to show (and John’s pieces reinforce this) – the US wasn’t particularly interested in the WMD mirage they cooked up for public consumption. They were interested in regime change, only.

Saddam’s futile efforts to appease the US by capitulating to nearly all their inspection demands, were a desperate last attempt to avoid war, but it was always unlikely to have any effect. As with the similar case of Milosevic, the US wanted war and would do the polar opposite of diplomacy (making very sure that the opponent would do something that could be described as “non-compliance”) to get it.

In response to Robin’s claim that “Saddam’s futile efforts to appease the US by capitulating to nearly all their inspection demands, were a desperate last attempt to avoid war, but it was always unlikely to have any effect,” that same Kenneth Pollack artice in TNR reads, “Over the last year, the debriefings of senior Iraqi officials captured during the invasion have revealed that, even with roughly 100,000 ground troops massed on the Iraqi border, Saddam convinced himself that the United States would never actually launch a war and, therefore, he could continue to play games with weapons inspectors” (pp. 21-22). I don’t know that this undermine’s Robin’s broader point, but I thought I should bring it up.

All the “scandals” you can name just cloud the basic fact that the Bush Administration has failed miserably at everything it’s tried except fund raising. In a sane country we would have fired them long ago. In the US our right to bear assault weapons and our burning need to prevent gay marriage is far more important than mere competence.

Absence of evidence does not prove absence, especially given Saddam’s lack of cooperation on substance (which Blix noted at the time, even as he complimented them for their cooperation on “process”).

It weighs much more heavily towards the absence side than it does the existence side, unless one believes in magic.

Ann –

Your paraphrase of Blix is not quite accurate.

As I noted on the 14th of February, intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks, in particular that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist.

Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food-testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen as well as large containers with seed-processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities have so far been found.

Iraq is expected to assist in the development of credible ways to conduct random checks of ground transportation.

Inspectors are also engaged in examining Iraq’s programs for remotely piloted vehicles. A number of sites have been inspected with data being collected to assess their range and other capabilities of the various models found, and inspections are continuing in this area.

There have been reports, denied from the Iraqi side, that proscribed activities are conducted underground. Iraq should provide information on any underground structure suitable for the production or storage of weapons of mass destruction.

During inspections of declared or undeclared facilities, inspection teams have examined building structures for any possible underground facilities. In addition, ground-penetrating radar equipment was used in several specific locations. No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far.

I should add that, both for the monitoring of ground transportation and for the inspection of underground facilities, we would need to increase our staff in Iraq. I’m not talking about a doubling of the staff. I would rather have twice the amount of high-quality information about sites to inspect than twice the number of expert inspectors to send.

That last bit is a thinly disguised dig at the US for its public claims that it had specific WMD intelligence that it refused to turn over to UNMOVIK.

As for the rest, are you seriously arguing that the Iraq that Blix was inspecting was in any way a sufficient threat to the US to justify an unprovoked invasion?

Are you seriously arguing that?

Thomas is right on point about one thing. If the international community had ever taken inspections seriously, we wouldn’t be at this point now. The international community had 10 years to show its intentions. It did so. The intentions were not to care about Saddam as a threat except when the US whined about it.

Oh yeah, NOW we should stop talking about these scandals, jhust when they are getting really interesting — and happen to be putting the heat on the Dems. Trousergate is as funny as hell (at least to Bill Clinton) but it has raised very serious questions about possible tampering with documents related to the security of the state.
So far the explanations have been so risible as to make the whole thing seem much more sinister.

John, your recollection isn’t in accord with mine. My recollection is that the Iraqis declared portions of their nuclear program, and those portions were destroyed under the supervision of IAEA inspectors, but that the inspectors didn’t in fact discover the material. Further, the Tuweitha site, as I recall, had been the subject of IAEA inspections for more than a decade by that point, and yet the inspectors had never discovered the materials destroyed in 1992.

s_bethy –

Thank you for digging up the exact text from the time. I was loosely paraphrasing from memory. The main message that I got from listening to Blix at the time was that inspections wouldn’t work unless Iraq truly cooperated, a point that many experts seem to agree on. The question was whether Iraq was truly, whole-heartedly cooperating. It didn’t appear to me that they were.

Was it a serious enough threat to justify an invasion? First, I always felt that there were other good reasons for the invasion, besides WMD, although that threat was certainly part of the picture. Second, yes, I still believe that, given what we knew or should have known at the time, there was a substantial threat that needed to be dealt with.

And what do we know today? We know that Saddam was working hard to maintain programs and human capital, in order to be capable of gearing up WMD production once it was safe to do so. An alternative for the world would have been to keep up inspections for a few more months and then drop the whole thing, because Blix hadn’t found much. In this case, the nuclear network would still be operating, Iraq could gear up its programs and buy what it needed from Pakistan, Libya and North Korea (which might finally have delivered on the $10 million order), terrorist groups would have had a base from which to work, and the Iraqi people would have less hope than ever. That doesn’t sound appealing to me.

There are other possiblities – maybe the world, especially the French, would have remained diligent and would have kept Iraq from ever gearing up again. This might have been best for everyone except the people of Iraq, but it’s only one possible outcome.

What we know today reinforces the idea that Saddam would have been a threat sooner or later, unless inspections were maintained indefinitely, and eternal vigilance was unlikely. I’m still surprized that they didn’t find stockpiles of WMD but don’t see how Bush could have been sure, at the time, that they weren’t there. Bush administration officials said repeatedly at the time that they couldn’t be sure what Saddam had.

Yes, given the expectation that inspections would be dropped eventually, given Saddam’s track record, given that past WMDs were still unaccounted for, given the human rights violations, given Saddam’s links with terrorists – for many reasons, I think that the war was justified, even though the stockpiles turned out to be smaller than expected.

We may be reaching diminishing returns on this, since neither of us is likely to convince the other. But I really appreciate your serious discussion.

I wanted to mention one aspect of your quote from Hans Blix – he said that Iraq was cooperating “in matters relating to process”. The Wisconsin Project article that I mentioned earlier, “Hans the Irrelevant”, points out that Blix himself differentiated between process and substance and said that Iraq was not cooperating on substance (giving a clear accounting of past weapons, as the UN had demanded). Blix was being diplomatic and lawyerly, complimenting Iraq’s cooperation on process (letting them visit various sites), but my idea of whole-hearted cooperation would include substance as well as process.

Blix said that, long term, there would be continued monitoring “to give confidence and to strike an alarm if signs were seen” – my interpretation of that (which you may not agree with) is that there would be a token force to make us all feel better, but I’m not confident that it would manage to see anything in the future. And what would we do if Saddam suddenly threw the inspectors out or confined them to their rooms, as he had done before (1998, I think)? The world (French) would have said “it’s safe now, so let’s forget the whole thing”.

On ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda (among other terrorists), I believe there’s more than you listed. For example, the 9/11 commission report says that Iraq offered Al Qaeda a safe haven (in 1999?), when it was having problems with the Taliban.

Granted, there probably wasn’t sufficient evidence of Iraq’s support for terrorism, by itself, to justify invasion. And there may not have been sufficient evidence of WMDs, by itself, to justify invasion. And Saddam being a “bad guy” (consistently, over more than a decade, as you pointed out) may not have been enough, by itself, to justify invasion. And certainly the UN doesn’t think that repeatedly flouting UN demands, by itself, could justify military action. But we weren’t facing just one of these by themselves, we were facing all at once, combined with the likelihood that failing to act now would lead to future (French and UN) demands that all sanctions be lifted against Iraq (as long as a token UN inspection team stayed in Baghdad hotel rooms indefinitely).

On stockpiles, the latest count I heard is at least 35 missiles with sarin or mustard gas, plus botulinum toxin. Granted, that may not qualify as even a small “stockpile” – I wasn’t trying to claim that and probably worded it poorly. But the programs were still in place, ready to start up again. And I don’t believe that Bush could reasonably have been expected to know at the time that the stockpiles weren’t there, when even top generals and frontline commanders in Iraq claim to have genuiunely believed that the Iraqi army had WMDs and were prepared to use them.

My bottom line on the invasion of Iraq is that the Iraqi people deserved a chance at a decent life, and now they’ve got it. Bringing democracy and human rights to many countries doesn’t mean invading each of them. There’s something to be said for making an example of one of the worst offenders (worst in terms of a combination of having used WMDs and invaded another country in the past, flouted UN sanctions, etc., not just human rights violations, although Saddam was a contender in that respect alone). The example has already had an effect on Libya and Pakistan. As Iraq develops into a peaceful, productive democracy, I think that seeing the change will have an effect on other countries, which will help us, long term, in the war on terror.

Well, this is more than I meant to write. Much of our disagreement is over estimates and opinions – how one weighs one risk against another or what probability one places on the inspectors’ likelihood of discovering what was there, etc. So, I still respectfully disagree but appreciate your opinions.

The report on the missiles (and artillery shells, by the way – I couldn’t think of the other term when I posted before) was on Fox News Special Report a few days ago. This was the cumulative total from scattered locations, not just one find. So, in that sense, it’s hard to think of it as a stockpile. On the other hand, there are many missiles and artillery shells not yet tested, so the numbers could increase over time.

The botulinum toxin was found a while ago, in a scientist’s home refrigerator. All of it was old, so it doesn’t signal new production since the Gulf War but does indicate that the old stuff wasn’t entirely destroyed, as Iraq told the UN.

But again, I never meant to imply that even small “stockpiles” had been found yet. There are only traces, which still surprises me.