The Stated Justification for the Iraq Invasion

From an email exchange with my friend Stewart…

(Stewart) Here’s a question I can’t answer. If there were no WMDs found, the invasion was unjustified? If there was no invasion, how would we know if there were any WMDs? Bad-news circular argument.

(Mike) I have a couple points to make here:

1. Calling it a circular argument is, I think, missing the larger point: if you’re going to base your military strategy on a policy of pre-emption, you absolutely need to have rock-solid intelligence if you expect to maintain any credibility in the world community (and, for that matter, actually accomplish your stated goals - in this case, lessening the threat from WMD proliferation). It’s evident at this point that there were fairly thick layers of deception and self-deception (how much of each is still not fully known) that were used to filter our actual intelligence information. As the backstory is slowly becoming public, what I’m seeing is that the Bush admin was working hard to take even the vaguest scraps of WMD-in-Iraq intelligence and trumpet them as incontrovertible facts. (This isn’t an exact quote, but as Hans Blix said, “they turned all the question marks in my reports into exclamation points”). You’ve got to admit the evidence Powell presented to the UN wasn’t exactly compelling. The Bush administration’s followup was, essentially - “trust us, we’ve got more but we can’t disclose it.” It seems pretty clear now that they didn’t have more, and the policy of pre-emption has lost whatever credibility it had.

2. I was just reading that the CIA provided the Bush administration with a report in June 2002 about the WMD bazaar in Pakistan, detailing their sales to North Korea, Libya, and Iran (and the missile technology North Korea provided in return). The Bush administration sat on it until October, after the debate about whether to invade Iraq was over (we actually confronted the North Koreans with this intelligence privately a few days prior to the Iraq vote in Congress, but none of it was shared with the Congress or the public until after the vote). When Powell testified before the Senate prior to the war, he specifically ruled out any justification for the war other than WMD. So it seems clear to me that the Bush administration was concerned about the WMD justification for the war being undercut by news about less ambiguous WMD proliferation occurring elsewhere. Why else would they sit on the Pakistan news for months? Which leads to the conclusion that they had other motivations, which is a topic for another post…