A Failed Defense

Matt makes good points about Jon Chait’s failed attempt to defend his initial support for the Iraq war. I have a couple whacks of my own. Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Chait’s argument, to me, is his use of the over-inclusiveness of the category of WMDs:

I should probably note at this point that my argument for the Iraq war, unlike that of many liberals, did not hinge upon democratization. I wasn’t sure creating a democracy in Iraq right away was feasible, and I figured that the Bush administration would settle for a stable, less repressive but still illiberal government in Baghdad. My rationale hinged upon Saddam Hussein’s failure to disarm. While the weapons of mass destruction rationale has gotten an even worse rap than the democracy rationale, I still believe the logic made the most sense given what we knew at the time. Let me explain.

The truce terms of the first Gulf war called for Saddam to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program under the watch of international inspectors. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam played a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors, alternately extending and withdrawing cooperation, depending mostly on how much diplomatic and military pressure he faced. It reached a crisis point in 1998, when Iraq stopped cooperating altogether. In response, the Clinton administration ordered three days of bombing, but–in part due to the impeachment–essentially let the issue drop. And, yet, even as Clinton left office, the reasons for enforcing the truce terms remained compelling. Iraq under Saddam posed a major regional menace and harbored ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. Saddam’s dreams of regional domination and history of irrational aggression suggested that allowing him to obtain such a weapon would be extremely dangerous.

Now, I will concede Chait’s point that it was not knowable at the time that Saddam had no WMDs. I certainly thought he did. The problem is that most of the weapons that are grouped under the WMD rubric are weapons that 1)simply did not pose any significant threat to American citizens, and 2)are no more (and in some case significantly less) powerful than weapons that can be constructed with materials that you can purchase at any Home Depot. Saddam having stockpiles of mustard gas or similar weapons is obviously not an adequate reason to go to war. Chait–like TNR generally–seems to realize this, and therefore throws nuclear weapons into this mix. I agree that if Iraq’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon was imminent, this would be a serious security risk that would justify the war. The problem, though, is that it was abundantly clear that Saddam was nowhere near acquiring a nuclear weapon; this is not just 20-20 hindsight but was obvious at the time. And what’s additionally maddening is that Chait doesn’t really argue otherwise; he relies on the same rhetorical ponzi scheme that has always been used to justify the war. Chait, rather than arguing that Saddam appeared to have a serious nuclear program, instead conflates intentions with capacities–a hallmark of Bush foreign policy that (as was noted in a recent cover story in Chait’s magazine) is an abject disaster. Chait is right that Hussein would have liked to have nuclear weapons. And I would like to have a billion dollars and be dating Scarlett Johansson, something that is about equally likely to happen. And the vague possibility that Saddam might acquire dangerous weapons at some point in the future certainly did not justify an immediate, nearly unilateral war.

Another thing to note is that Chait is, I think, quite right to oppose The Nation‘s quasi-pacifist foreign policy, and is correct in pointing out their blunders. But by tying being a “liberal hawk” to an ongoing defense of a disastrous war against a country that posed no security threat to the United States, he plays into the hands of his bete noires (as well as demonstrating the fundamental uselessness of the “hawk” vs. “dove” distinction.) The difficult task of the Democrats is to develop a foreign policy that allows for necessary interventions while being something different than reflexively supporting every military action of the United States government. Chait’s attempt to argue that the Iraq war was justified in national security terms–something that is not only false in retrospect but was quite clearly wrong at the time–is not a helpful contribution to this project.