Last Word On the Iraq War

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The mills have been grinding feverishly in the matter of Iraq. They have, for the most part, dealt with questions having to do with our entering the war, but these have led to promptings of different kinds on how to get away from Iraq.


Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth (my colleague at National Review) has amassed a near encyclopedic document giving instances of what he deems dissimulations by the administration and its supporters in calling for war on Iraq. Norman Podhoretz defends the administration thoroughly in Commentary magazine. Frank Rich of the New York Times scathes up his weekly scorn; he is answered by The New York Sun. Michael Kinsley appears in Slate, the online magazine he founded, exercising his airborne syllogisms in telling us what to do.


Here is my reading on the Iraq question.


The principals, Democrats and Republicans, believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, some ready to fire, others being developed.


Here is a brief item in Time magazine dated July 7, 2003, three months after we conquered Baghdad: “Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, ‘Are you in charge of finding WMD?’ Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, Gen. Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn’t his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD?”


That is not how someone who was less than certain that they were there somewhere would have deported himself.


In fact, the weapons of mass destruction were not there. Many public statements by the president and vice president and others have been influenced by the absence of the WMDs.


What is happening is a conscious, and even conceivably unconscious, effort to distract attention from ignoble failures of the intelligence community. If one’s handling of the history of the pre-war years is animated by a desire to justify the military course that was taken, one can maneuver words in such a way as to argue that the weapons had every reason to be there. We knew, after all, that they had existed as a part of the Saddam armory; that they had been used 10 times; that an Iraqi official had traveled to Niger, presumably to attempt to initiate the purchase of yellowcake uranium.


We have feasted on lamentations for being too late at critical moments in U.S. history, too late on Dec. 6, 1941, too late on Sept. 10, 2001. The sweep of such thought has encouraged defective rhetorical joiner work. President Bush suggested that Iraq’s purportedly successful nuclear program was now searching for uranium, implying that it was operational, even though, after thorough investigation, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported it inoperative as of 1998.


Looking ahead, Michael Kinsley (who was opposed to the war) reminds us that “thousands of Americans died in Vietnam after America’s citizens and government were in general agreement that the war was a mistake. We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war. Do you believe that if Bush, Cheney, and company could turn back the clock, they would do this again? And now, thanks to Rep. John Murtha, it is permissible to say, or at least to ask, ‘Why not just get out now? Or at least soon, on a fixed schedule?’


“There are arguments against this – some good, some bad – but the worst is the one delivered by Cheney and others with their most withering scorn. It is the argument that it is wrong to tell American soldiers risking their lives in a foreign desert that they are fighting for a mistake.


“One strength of this argument is that it doesn’t require defending the war itself. The logic applies equally whether the war is justified or not. Another strength is that the argument is true, in a way: It is a terrible thing to tell someone he or she is risking death in a mistaken cause. But it is more terrible actually to die in that mistaken cause.”


Kinsley ends by divulging some thinking in the Pentagon that he might have divined using nothing more than his agile brain: that the longer the war goes on, the more people will die. “That is worth keeping in mind while you try to decide whether American credibility or Iraqi prosperity or Middle East stability can justify the cost in blood and treasure. And don’t forget to factor in the likelihood that the war will actually produce these fine things.”


We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war.


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