TASTES GREAT! LESS FILLING!

Bush Reverts to Liberal Rationale for Iraq War: Critics Still Oppose War Despite Hussein's Human Rights Record (Terry M. Neal, July 9, 2003, washingtonpost.com)

If the Bush administration had wanted to make the case for going to war against Iraq on purely humanitarian reasons, it could have done so. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's truly bad guys, a horrific leader who brutalized and terrorized his own people. But the administration likely would have found much resistance from conservatives who have long argued that the United States should not try to act as the world's police department.

So the administration made national security its strongest case for launching an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally
frowned-upon preemptive war.

Fast forward to the present: The administration that had 100 percent certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction has zero percent certainty as to where they are now. The White House and the president's defenders have reverted to their fall-back humanitarian position -- that the removal of Hussein was justification enough for the war. [...]

It could be argued that the administration had justification enough to invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein's human rights record. So why did it emphasize the national security angle? After the war, evidence for the national security argument is sparse while mass graves in Iraq give proof of genocide and political assassinations. Perhaps Bush didn't push the human rights rationale harder because it would have created a precedent of intervention that would have been more politically perilous for Bush than the potential of exaggerating claims about Iraq's direct threat to Americans.

Whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush administration may have lied to or
misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won't exonerate the president if the latter is true as well.

All of which raises the question of whether Mr. Neal reads the newspapers as well as writing for them. This "admission", for instance, made all the papers, Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz Interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair (DoD, May 9, 2003):

Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --

Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --

(Pause)

Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --

Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.

Sorry, hold on again.

Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --

Q: This is extraordinary.

Kellems: You had good timing.

Q: I'm really grateful.

Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.

The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.

The justifications for the war are not mutually exclusive either. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 1:33 PM