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[Previous entry: "peDoghQo'"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Well, poo."] 22 May 2003: "Once more unto the breach..."
Hello again. I've also concluded that while lists and discussion boards are a good medium for working out narrow technical issues and minor political debates, they're a really crappy medium for major political differences. For times like these, when Big Issues are in the air, the arms-length, long-post, take-it-or-leave-it nature of blogs works better than the "shared space" metaphor of lists.During the blogging lull of the past week, much of my activity has been over on the 3WA boards, and this spell has served to impress upon me once again exactly how correct Evan Kirchoff's observation is. To my mind, there is currently one Big Issue in particular which appears to defy reasoned discussion, and that is the matter of Iraq's NBC weapons stockpiles and programmes. This is a topic I've touched on before, but in the intervening two weeks, the tone of the discussion has hardly improved. In my earlier entry, I linked to "Blinded by Bush-Hatred", an opinion piece in the WaPo by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor of the New Republic; to recap, Chait's point was this: Opponents of the war are starting to assert, or at least hint, that the entire rationale for the conflict has been undermined. The notion that Bush made the whole thing up about weapons of mass destruction has taken root on the left and is creeping ever closer to the liberal mainstream.On Tuesday, I received an e-mail from Lindsey pointing me to an article by Molly Ivins, titled "Questions Of Mass Destruction"; this piece was published eleven days after Chait's, and serves to illustrate almost perfectly what Chait was talking about. The fundamental sentence to Ivins' piece is the following: Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war, or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus.The most obvious flaw with this sentence is the fallacy of bifurcation; the two possibilities presented by Ivins are by no means the only ones in existence. For instance, in this article in Scientific American about UNMOVIC bioweapons inspector Rocco Casagrande, I found the following passages particularly intriguing: During their stay, the team members never uncovered what they were seeking. Still, Casagrande came away with a distinct uneasiness. It seems unimaginable to him that a government so obsessed with documentation--the moving of a centrifuge from one room to another required extensive paperwork--would be unable to account for how it disposed of pathogens from its previous biowarfare program and to reveal what it did with large quantities of growth media used to culture pathogenic agents.So there's a distinct possibility some materials might be secreted in a number of mosques, but I suspect that, were US troops to go tearing up newly-built mosques, this would not go down well with the war critics (not to mention the Iraqi populace). Moreover, even the two possibilities which she does present are based on assertions which are questionable at best. The foremost assertion is that the entire basis for this war was the alleged possession by Iraq of large stockpiles of NBC weapons, and only stockpiles of NBC weapons. It is vital that one disregard any indications of the ability or the desire on Iraq's part to acquire NBC weapons or delivery systems, lest one be forced to acknowledge the findings of UNSCOM and UNMOVIC over the past twelve years, all of which point to only one possible conclusion, which is that the Iraqi government never for a moment had any intention whatsoever of fulfilling its obligations to divest itself of NBC weapons, development programmes and delivery systems, as it ostensibly agreed to do in 1991 and continued to do throughout the following twelve years. As Chait noted: [A]ccepting the fact that Iraq had an extensive and continuing program for weapons of mass destruction doesn't require taking Bush at his word. The U.N. Special Commission, when it finished its work in 1999, concluded the same thing. So has Germany's intelligence service. So has the United Kingdom's. Indeed, the only people who seem to doubt it are either allies of Hussein or those who distrust Bush so much that they automatically assume everything he says must be false.Added hyperlink mine. In constructing her argument, it is not sufficient for Ivins—or others of a similar bent—to focus on actual overstatements or falsehoods (and there have been a number) told by members of the Bush administration; instead, it necessary to create a catalogue of claims the adminsitration supposedly made. Ivins: The administration detailed those weapons with excruciating precision: 5,000 gallons of anthrax, several tons of VX nerve gas, between 100 and 500 tons of other toxins including botulinin, mustard gas, ricin and Sarin, 15 to 20 Scud missiles, drones fitted with poison sprays and mobile chemical laboratories.I find it remarkable that I spent the best part of this PM searching the sites of CNN, the BBC, The Economist and the White House, and I simply cannot find this list in the form Ivins alludes to. I find Colin Powell stating to the Security Council on 05-Feb-2003: Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent."Estimate"; not the same as "certainty." A very similar comment from Bush in this year's State of the Union: Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."The materials to produce" said chemical warfare agents, not the actual, completed CW agents. On 25-Feb-2003, I find Donald Rumsfeld telling the Hoover Institution that Iraq's chemical and biological warfare capabilities are, in my judgment, probably more lethal and dangerous today than they would have been back in '91, but I don't know that for sure. I don't think anyone does, except the Iraqis.Again, an estimate, this time accompanied by a qualifying statement about not knowing for certain. Throughout, I find references to NBC weapons which Iraq might have or might be able to produce in short order. When numbers are mentioned, they are generally from UNSCOM and/or UNMOVIC and list materials unaccounted for, or past production numbers uncovered by UNSCOM despite failure on the Iraqi government's part to declare the materials produced, etc. Lindsey's e-mail also pointed me to this post in the blog "Reenhead"; in the comments, we find "Dave L" writing: We were promised tens of thousands of liters of anthrax, tons of illegal chemicals and a working nuclear weapons development program.Maybe that's what you want to believe, Dave, but I can't find any evidence that such a promise was ever made. "Dr. Stangelove" (how very original), meanwhile, claims: His threat to the United States was based upon evidence (weak even back then) that Saddam was giving terrorists anthrax, VX, and nuclear materials for terrorist operations.No, I believe the case was that Saddam was pursuing NBC development and production programmes (interestingly, a point neither "Dave L" or "Dr. Strangelove" attempt to refute), and that Saddam was known to have links to various terrorists, and that therefore the possibility was far from unthinkable that, if left unattended, the Iraqi government might at some point supply some of those NBC weapons to one more terrorist organisations hostile to the United States. Now, I have to say I didn't think that was particularly likely, but that brings me back to Ivins' flawed assertions. The alleged possession of NBC weapons per se was far from the only justification proffered for this war; there were the violations of relevant UNSC resolutions from 687 up to and including 1441, and there was the humanitarian angle. Indeed, as Congressman Hayworth of Arizona put it in the National Review (not my preferred reading material, but there you go), Bush has been much criticised for constantly changing his rationale for war, going from WMDs to Iraq's link to 9/11 and terrorism to human rights to regime change to introducing democracy into the Arab Middle East and back to WMDs again. The fact is, it was all those reasons, and yet the critics can now remember only one.And remember it inaccurately at that, evidently. It strikes me that this meme of "huge stockpiles of WMDs were the only justification for this war" is starting to closely resemble the one about the Reagan administration supplying CW agents and bioweapons to the Iraqi government during the Iran-Iraq War; it starts with a distortion of some actual facts, gets passed along in a round of Chinese Whispers (or "telephone," as I understand the game is called in America) until it's blindly accepted as fact and no-one ever stops to wonder whether it might be a good idea to verify it. Interestingly, Ivins brings it up as well: The Friedman camp's reasoning on "lies don't matter" is that Saddam Hussein was such a miserable bastard that taking him out was worthy in and of itself. As a human-rights supporter all these years, I made that argument, too. I even made it when the Reagan administration was giving Saddam WMDs."Giving Saddam WMDs," no less; I'd heard "selling" but "giving" is a new one on me. Nice strawman with the "lies don't matter" there, I might add: the complete reasoning on the part of Thomas Friedman—one of the very few American opinion columnists worth reading, in my opinion—would be (or so I assume) that there were many reasons given for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, that the continued Iraqi ability and willingness to produce more NBC weapons was as dangerous as any actual possession by Iraq of NBC weapons (if not more so), and that therefore any overstatement on the part of administration regarding the reliability of intelligence indicating possession by Iraq of stockpiles at the time isn't much to worry about, given that the other arguments still stand. And frankly, I find it somewhat incongruous that Ivins claims that she thought it would have been perfectly acceptable to invade Iraq and topple Saddam in the 1980s (never mind that the Cold War was still on at the time), but that somehow it's not acceptable now, notwithstanding the introduction of branding as a punishment for draft dodgers and deserters, the crushing of the 1991 rebellion and the forced displacement of the Marsh Arabs in the meantime. The inconsistency in Ivins' argument is only made more acute by her evidently accepting Blair's invocation of the humanitarian argument; to quote Congressman Hayworth again: Does that imply Bush has explaining to do but Blair doesn't? That U.S. credibility is lost but Britain's isn't? That Basra was legitimately liberated but the rest of Iraq wasn't?I admit I'd be a bit hesitant to use the term "liberated" myself, especially at this juncture with the place under a de facto occupation government, but the point is clear; it's sort of difficult to argue that ius ad bellum applies to different allied parties in different ways. Either the war is permissible, or it is not. Ivins' conclusion: John Quincy Adams said, "We go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." We shouldn't help create them, either.I hardly need point out that the Adams quote goes directly counter to her own sentiments on the permissibility of toppling Saddam in the 1980s, and to her evident acceptance of the humanitarian argument on Blair's part as well. As for "creating monsters," I'm well into Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear by now, and from what I can make out, Saddam didn't need much help becoming a monster. Most of the outside help was provided by the Soviet Union and East Germany, who provided the technical assistance, advisors and training in methods of torture to the Ba'ath régime; Makiya notes, however, that the local demand for investigatory and torturing expertise is logically prior to the availability of eager suppliers and the resources (for example oil revenues) that make the proliferation of such an "unproductive" activity possibleIt should be noted, moreover, that Saddam Hussein was already assistant secretary-general of the Ba'ath party when it seized power in 1968, and became deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council immediately afterwards; thus, we was second only to Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr (whom he purged in 1979) in the hierarchy of both the Ba'ath party and the government long before he started the Iran-Iraq War. Thus, blaming Reagan for helping to "create" the monster that is Saddam is comparable to blaming FDR for helping to "create" the monster that was Joseph Stalin (as if the Gulag didn't exist before 1941). |
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