The decision by the administration’s Iraq Survey Group to terminate its search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction will be taken by many critics of the war, both foreign and domestic, as a vindication of their contention that America was hoodwinked into a costly conflict. We have a different view, which owes something, in the first instance, to the contents of the ISG’s own report, a far more nuanced document than those who would appropriate its conclusions have so far conceded. In any case, the ISG works for the director of central intelligence and channels its energies back and forth according to whatever is the most pressing issue of the day. At the moment, that is the insurgency. It would be quite wrong if the Iraq Survey Group kept up a search for these weapons of mass destruction – which may in any case have been secreted out to Syria – just to vindicate a war vote. It may, in time return to the search.

Following hundreds of hours of interviews with key figures in the Baath party, the intelligence services, and the scientists of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, the ISG concluded that Saddam aspired incrementally to recreate a nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities, which were essentially destroyed in 1991. He intended to do so after United Nations sanctions were removed, though with a different mix of capabilities from that which previously existed. Toward the end of his rule, he had three different kinds of long-range missiles in the pipeline. Particularly gruesome was his renewed focus on germ and nerve gas warfare, which included the placement of sarin in perfume bottles destined for shipment to Europe. The ISG also deemed significant Saddam’s most strenuous efforts to maintain the regime’s WMD “skills base,” through a combination of preventing scientists from departing by coercive means and by hiring technicians from Russia.

We mention this because some of the presentation in the press of the ISG’s work makes it seem as though it is a Clarence Darrow-like indictment of Mr. Bush and his works. If anything, it is an indictment of American intelligence and a host of foreign services that believed that Iraq did possess WMD. Those “believers” included the espionage agencies of France and Russia, two countries that did a lot to develop Saddam’s atomic capabilities. But if the ISG is right, then it is surely a vindication of the Bush doctrine, as enunciated in his West Point address of 2002: that after the events of September 11, 2001, with all that they implied for the possibility of even greater atrocities with WMD by rogue states or substate actors, America could not afford to sit back and absorb the first blow. She would have to take pre-emptive action, not least against suicide attackers for whom the traditional threat of retaliation held few terrors.

The administration’s focus on WMD, such as it was, owes much to the need to ensure the survival of Tony Blair, Mr. Bush’s main foreign partner in the liberation of Iraq. For some inexplicable reason, the British premier concluded in 2002 and 2003 that war would be much easier to sell in his own country on the grounds of taking a nuclear threat to the U.N. rather than on the basis of Saddam’s human rights violations and massive crimes against his own people and neighbors. As Norman Podhoretz notes in Commentary’s forthcoming February issue in, “The War Against World War IV” – a dissection of the variegated rationales of the opponents of the president’s policies – too heavy a stress was placed on WMD. While WMD provided an immediate casus belli, it obscured the long-term strategic rationale for the operation, namely to start the process of draining the swamps of the Middle East that give rise to terrorism and hatred. Saddam’s WMD program was the symptom, not the cause of all that. The emphasis placed upon it was thus mostly a tactical and presentational failure, rather than an invalidation of the war – which remains the most urgent quest before our nation.