Conservatives must face Iraq facts
By W. James Antle III
web posted October 11, 2004
The Iraq Survey Group headed by Charles Duelfer has released
its report on the status of Iraqi weapons programs and the results
confirm what many had long suspected: When the United States
invaded, Iraq did not posses weapons of mass destruction, was
hardly engaged in serious efforts to produce them and Saddam
Hussein's nuclear capabilities were actually deteriorating rather
than advancing.
These findings contradict prewar statements by President Bush
and top administration officials, and seriously undercut the
rationale for the Iraq war. In an essay appearing in the New
York Times on Sunday, Franklin Foer observed that even many
conservative intellectuals and journalists are now entertaining
second thoughts about the war, in some cases reaching
conclusions more consistent with the old right's noninterventionist
traditions.
But these doubts are not necessarily reverberating among the
conservative grassroots. In fact, an October 6 CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll found that 62 percent of self-described
Republicans, a fair if imperfect proxy for the rank-and-file right,
believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the
9/11 attacks against America. Fully 50 percent believed that the
Iraqi dictator was personally involved in planning the attacks.
These are claims that the administration does not make and did
not even endorse prior to the war, although the campaign may
not mind collecting votes based on these misperceptions. Indeed,
Steve Sailer has expressed
concern that Karl Rove's strategy may be to rely on the
"dumbing down of Republicans" on these issues.
My readers are decent, thoughtful, patriotic Americans (and, of
course, friends of America in other countries). Many of you
supported the Iraq war, out of loyalty to the president and a
sincere desire to keep the U.S. safe from WMDs in the hands of
madmen. Although I was skeptical of an Iraq campaign from the
beginning, I found persuasive many of the same arguments that
convinced you to support to the war -- so much so that I
tempered my opposition shortly before the invasion and declared
myself undecided on the question. More than the arguments,
however, I softened my position because I trusted and wanted to
believe pro-war figures in the administration I held in
particularly high regard. But experience is sometimes kinder to
our doubts than our hopes.
The evidence is in and it has been gathering since Baghdad fell.
According to the Duelfer report, there were "no credible
indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical
munitions" after 1991, and "no direct evidence that Iraq, after
1996, had plans for a new BW [biological weapons] program."
Contrary to warnings that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear
program and was perhaps a year away from having weapons,
the Iraqi nuclear weapons program had been stopped in 1991
and the survey group found "no evidence to suggest concerted
efforts to restart" it.
It's tempting to respond that virtually all the players, including
leading Democrats from Bill Clinton to John Kerry and every
major Western intelligence agency, believed that Iraq possessed
WMDs. But some experts did have doubts. And while there was
a broad, if inaccurate, government consensus on Iraqi WMDs,
the notion that this constituted a risk serious enough to justify
immediate, preemptive war was a minority viewpoint. There
were also many uncertainties in the intelligence, partly as a result
of limited Western knowledge of the facts on the ground in Iraq
after the first Gulf War, and political assertions made on the basis
of disputed intelligence estimates. In short, long before we
received the conclusive evidence we have today there were
sufficient doubts to call into question the wisdom of war.
Without the weapons, there remain two primary conservative
justifications for the war. The first is the neoconservative dogma
that democracy in Iraq will promote democracy throughout the
Middle East, altering the political conditions that currently breed
terror. But even if true, this does not mean that the U.S. can
necessarily effect this transformation militarily through democratic
nation-building. The second -- which appears to be Duelfer's
own position -- is that the sanctions regime was eroding and
would have eventually ended, at which point Saddam would
have been likely to resume WMD production. Yet it is difficult to
see why this much more speculative threat would have required
drastic, immediate and unilateral action by the U.S. during a
global war on terror with numerous other threats.
And the existence of myriad threats highlights the real problem:
there are opportunity costs in this dangerous world to being
bogged down in a WMD-free Iraq. Yes, presidents sometimes
have to make decisions based on imperfect intelligence. But
there were substantial prewar doubts. We conservatives have
too often allowed this president to soft-pedal those doubts and,
worse, conflate the war aims with its actual results.
Many conservatives have been too slow to grapple with new
data unfolding on the ground in Iraq, preferring the comfort of
familiar talking points. But it is not disloyal to our brave troops, a
thousand of whom have already made the ultimate sacrifice for
their country, to question the war. Nor is this presidential
campaign the wrong time to raise such questions, for fear of
helping Kerry, whose position on the war is indecipherable and
is otherwise banally liberal. In addition to the election,
something else is at stake: the credibility of conservatism as the
guarantor of responsible national defense.
William F. Buckley, Jr., who more recently confessed that the
case for the Iraq war was inaccurate and that in hindsight he
would have opposed it, once described conservatism as the
"politics of reality." If liberals are seen by the American people as
more realistic on Iraq, conservatives will come to regret it --
eventually, if not on November 2.
W. James Antle III is an assistant editor of The American
Conservative and a senior editor for Enter Stage Right. The
views expressed above represent his alone.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com