The failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and weapons inspector David Kay’s recent admission that such stockpiles likely don’t exist, has Democrats increasingly insinuating that President Bush lied to take the nation to war. For example, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire recently, Wesley Clark ventured that “We don’t know what the motivation was,” and that Mr. Bush is “misleading the American people.”
Here’s a theory: The President knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But because he had an ulterior motive for going to war, he sent Dick Cheney over to Langley to coerce the CIA into saying that there were. Tony Blair likewise “sexed up” the British intelligence estimates. And Messrs. Bush and Blair thought it would be a great idea to invade the country, and then have the British and American people find out that the claims they made about weapons of mass destruction were false, which they knew them to be all along.
The theories you hear about this are all nonsense! Before the war, the intelligence agencies of the world agreed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. David Kay has cited German and Russian intelligence reports that “painted a picture of Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction.” Even Jacques Chirac warned last February about “the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq.” And you can go down through the list of statements by Democrats from Bill Clinton to John Kerry to Wesley Clark to the whole lot of them — who all saw the same intelligence — and not one of them doubted that Saddam had these weapons and that his regime was a growing threat.
Throughout all of this ridiculous, partisan, election-year rhetoric, let’s not lose sight of the nightmare scenario, all too plausible after Sept. 11: A murderous dictator gives terrorists a nuclear weapon, and they use it to incinerate an American city.
There are always deeper, often unstated but nonetheless widely understood reasons to go to war besides the simple, lowest common denominator arguments given by politicians and diplomats. While the threat of weapons of mass destruction was the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s arguments for the invasion of Iraq, the far more profound and geopolitically important reason for war with Saddam Hussein was to establish the precedent of the United States acting preemptively and decisively against a tyrannical regime suspected of pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
That precedent has already paid big dividends: Witness Moammar Gadhafi’s decision last year to admit inspectors and come clean about Libya’s weapons programs, Iran’s newly professed interest in international protocols, Pakistan’s investigation of its weapons-proliferating nuclear scientists, and Kim Jong Il’s invitation for a U.S. delegation — which included former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker– to tour their nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon.
One of the most important outcomes of the war in Iraq is that the burden of proof is no longer on us to establish that a dictator has weapons of mass destruction, but rather on the dictator to prove to the world that he does not. The tyrants of the world are now on notice that even being suspected of having weapons of mass destruction can prematurely end their lifetime tenures.