At long last,
many are realizing that President Bush misled the public about
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But unlike the vigorous questioning
of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain on the same issue, our
long overdue debate about Saddam Hussein's presumed illicit arsenal
is missing the point.
Before the
war, the question was not primarily about whether Iraq retained
proscribed weapons from its old stockpiles. Many at the United
Nations, and many American anti-war commentators, assumed that
it did. Remnants of the stockpiles may still be found.
Instead,
the question was whether Iraqi weapons of mass destruction posed
a pressing threat to the peace. Bush said these weapons constituted
a "grave and gathering danger" to national and international
security, a threat so great that only full-scale invasion to "disarm"
the dictator was adequate. He accused the United Nations of being
"irrelevant to the problems of our time" because it
dared to temporize in the face of the obvious Iraqi peril.
Saddam's
regime did not fire chemical or biological rockets at US and British
troops even though its survival in power was at stake. Even after
Republican Guard positions were overrun, US and British troops
discovered no warheads ready to be used in 45 minutes, as alleged
by the now infamous British dossier of September 2002.
Two months
after the welcome demise of the regime, US military specialists
are still baffled as to where the oft-mentioned tons of deadly
toxins might be. CIA maps of likely weapons sites have reportedly
turned up nothing but two trailers that may or may not have been
used to manufacture biological agents. The top Iraqi scientists
who, according to pre-war intelligence, were helping the regime
to rearm itself, are now in US custody, but they have not led
their captors to caches of arms. At best, Bush and Blair were
wildly exaggerating the Iraqi threat when they spoke of Saddam's
disarmament as the most urgent task before humanity.
Before the
war, Bush and Blair asserted that the Baathist regime had missiles
and unmanned drones poised for offensive use against its neighbors
or against the West. More scarily, they told us that Iraq was
developing nuclear bombs for transfer to radical Islamist groups
like al-Qaeda. They harped on little bits of evidence that supported
these theories, ignoring large bodies of evidence that undercut
them. They were intent on frightening the public into supporting
the war.
Opponents
of the war, by contrast, did not stretch the known facts to fit
their position. Most of us argued that Iraq might indeed have
chemical and biological programs, even if many of us regarded
the nuclear evidence as doctored.
But now Bush,
Blair and their defenders in the punditocracy are trying to deceive
the public all over again. Bush now says the weapons programs
may have been looted or destroyed. Maybe, but Bush is changing
the subject -- the mere existence of forbidden munitions will
not equal the "mortal threat" he posited before the
war.
Congress
should no longer be cowed by the White House dissembling about
Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration
should be held accountable for its abuse of office in hyping the
Iraqi threat to justify a war that had little, if anything, to
do with the security of Americans.
(Chris Toensing
is editor of Middle East Report.)
(c) Chris
Toensing
