HIS HALITOSIS WOULD HAVE BEEN SUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION:

Richard Perle's Horizons (Bret Stephens and Michael Oren, Oct. 19, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Perle: The justification was never restricted to weapons of mass destruction. The president talked about regime change very early on. The regime change argument was eclipsed by the weapons of mass destruction argument partly because the Department of State was always uncomfortable talking about regime change... [because] that it is outside what is today the accepted notion of legitimacy in international terms.... But weapons of mass destruction and violations of UN resolutions are a solid basis for reaction and the State Department gravitated toward the legally correct view.

If someone were to go back and look at all of George Bush's statements on Iraq he would find that at a certain point he stops talking about regime change and talks almost exclusively about violations of UN resolutions, some of which, by the way, centered on human rights. Not all of them centered on weapons of mass destruction. Now that's been forgotten and I hear it said all the time that the basis was the weapons of mass destruction. In any case, we know that Saddam had a weapons of mass destruction program. Although we haven't found stockpiles, I don't believe that Saddam was significantly less dangerous because he didn't have a stockpile.

The reality is that in the aftermath of September 11 Bush became seized with the idea of not waiting too long. The problem was compounded by the decline in support for the containment policy, which was no longer merely containment. The sanctions regime was falling apart.... There was the very real prospect that Saddam was going to emerge as a great hero, having outlasted the sanctions regime, having outlasted the West, having violated the cease-fire, any number of UN resolutions and getting away with it and this became increasingly intolerable. So we had to do something. The fact that we have not found the stockpile in no way diminishes the justification for taking that action....

We many not and need not always choose to do so, but is there ever a bad reason for the West to depose a totalitarian dictator?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 21, 2003 8:50 AM