Posted on 02/08/2004 9:00:02 PM PST by Clive
The hawks have their tail feathers between their legs these days, no doubt about it. Friends of mine ridicule me mercilessly for swallowing that hokum about WMDs. George Bush has dropped his weapons talk in favour of happy blather about human rights, and the leaders of the Western world stand revealed as liars, or incompetents, or both.
As my colleague Jeffrey Simpson argued yesterday, the world is a very scary place.
The trouble is, the world might be much scarier if Saddam were still around. My guess is he'd be burning up the phone lines to Pakistan, ordering up some centrifuge technology from Abdul Qadeer Khan. Mr. Khan and the Musharraf regime would still be peddling their nuclear wares to anyone who wanted them, because who was going to stop them? Not the Americans, who would once again have proved that they're all talk and no action. And certainly not the UN, which is genetically incapable of confronting a rogue regime or slowing the course of nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan's nuclear deceptions were blown wide open for one reason only. Colin Powell put the boots to President Pervez Musharraf, and Mr. Musharraf knew there would be consequences. Would that have happened without the war in Iraq? Would you want to bet on it?
Critics say that Mr. Bush and Tony Blair misled us about the case for war, and they're right. There were the stated reasons (which included WMDs), and the real reasons, which were never mentioned publicly. One of the real reasons was that sometimes force is the only way to persuade other people not to mess with you. The salutary effect of this message is evident in Libya, Syria, Iran and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, where the ruling princes admit they may have a problem with the clerics who preach annihilation of the West.
The other unstated reason was to throw a stink bomb into an Arab world that has long been a dysfunctional, backward breeding ground for various dangerous pathologies. Without fundamental reforms (of which there are no signs from within), these failed states will continue to export trouble. Bushites believe exporting democracy to Iraq might set off a virtuous chain reaction of reform. It's worth a shot.
As for the failures of intelligence, well, this isn't exactly the first time. The experts were appalled to discover just how far Saddam's nuclear program had got by the time of the 1991 Gulf war. They also vastly underestimated the threat from al-Qaeda. No wonder they were inclined to err on the prudential side.
After the Gulf war, Iraq's arsenal was mostly a black box until one of his sons-in-law defected in 1995 and spilled the beans. (Inexplicably, the son-in-law returned to Iraq and was promptly executed.) After that the best assessments came from UN inspectors who left Iraq in 1998. After that, as David Kay admits, Iraq was a black box again. It now looks as if Saddam's weapons programs fell apart in the late 1990s. Maybe he dismantled them himself because he was afraid they'd be discovered. Maybe his scientists lied to him, took the money and stuffed it into Swiss bank accounts. Maybe he only thought he still had vats of anthrax. In any event, former UN inspectors such as Richard Butler are sure the Iraqi leader would have cranked up his war machine just as soon as the world looked the other way. Saddam was not an imminent threat. But he was an inevitable one.
As for human rights, war opponents keep insisting they're irrelevant to this debate. After all, abuses occur in dozens of nations, and nobody attacks them. So I won't mention the genocides, the ethnic cleansings, the dungeons, the massacres and all the rest; nor the sentiments of the Iraqi people, who are overwhelmingly relieved to be freed of the worst tyranny outside North Korea.
Of course, they're furious at the Americans as well -- furious they didn't get rid of Saddam back in 1991. Time and time again, I was asked in Iraq last fall why the Americans had betrayed the Iraqi people and sentenced them to 12 more years of hell?
What if there had been no war? There would not be thousands of people peacefully marching in the streets of Iraq today to demand direct elections. There would not be a hundred new newspapers of all political stripes, or a boom in sales of satellite dishes, or brand-new Internet cafés on the main street of Saddam's home town Tikrit. There would not be 30,000 pilgrims allowed to make the hajj.
You can despise George Bush and everything about him. You can believe he duped us about the war. You can even believe the war was fought for Halliburton, if you like, and still believe that the world is a lot safer than it was a year ago.mwente@globeandmail.ca
Saddam was not an imminent threat. But he was an inevitable one.
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