loquitur

We went into Iraq for a number of stated reasons (and I'm choosing my words carefully) of which WMDs was a rather late arrival to the list. It was added because Blair prevailed upon Bush to go to the UN, and the prior UN resolutions were heavily weighted toward disarmament and disclosure. So the UN presentation was heavily focused on the WMD issues. Bush had been prepared to go in without that whole kabuki dance in the UN, which ended up delaying things by about 6 months. WMD became a heavily stressed theme for the likes of Cheney but it was added relatively late in the game. As things stood at that point, before Powell's speech, the inspectors had been tossed out in '98 in violation of the Gulf War-ending resolutions, there were regular shots taken at coalition planes in the no-fly zones and a whole bunch of other stuff going on. That's the irony here - it's not like WMDs were a necessary condition to the Iraq invasion. Whether they were a sufficient reason is a different question. Whether the invasion was a good idea even if Saddam had WMDs is yet a third question.

I just read an extract of an article by Fred Kagan that essentially says the war was a mistake because there is no evidence that the culture in the Middle East as it currently exists can accommodate liberal democracy. I printed it out and will read it in a bit. If anyone is interested in the link, I'll try to dig it out. But if that blurb is right, then the issue as pertains to Iraq was twofold in 2003: (1) was there anything to be done about Saddam Hussein? and (2) if there was, what should have replaced him? Number 2 is the harder question to deal with, and that's the question that wasn't adequately analyzed. I get the impression that the administration assumed that liberal democracy is a default position for humanity, which is decidedly not the case - it's a relatively rare and relatively recent exception to prior human experience. And when a culture doesn't support liberal democracy, an implemented democracy fails -- as it regularly does in Haiti, as it did in Zimbabwe, as it did several times in Nigeria, and on and on and on.

The impression I'm getting here is that people are collapsing issue #1 and issue #2, and misdefining issue #1 as being about WMDs, which is a rewrite of history.