Matt Yglesias, merciful soul that he is, looks past Howard Dean’s disappointing statements on the Park51 project and, instead, praises Dean’s courage and prescience during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Quoting Dean:
My question is, why not use our information to help the UN disarm Iraq without war?
Secretary Powell’s recent presentation at the UN showed the extent to which we have Iraq under an audio and visual microscope. Given that, I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness. He said there would be no smoking gun, and there was none.
At the same time, it seems to me we are in possession of information that would be very helpful to UN inspectors. For example, if we know Iraqi scientists are being detained at an Iraqi guesthouse, why not surround the building and knock on the door?
If we think a facility is being used for biological weapons, why not send the inspectors to check it out?
And if we believe terrorists – especially if they are terrorists linked to al Qaeda – have set up a poison and explosives training center in Northern Iraq, outside Saddam Hussein’s control, why haven’t we verified that information and destroyed that camp?
Yglesias adds:
Faced with the threat of invasion, Saddam Hussein was largely knuckling under to demands for inspections. The UN weapons inspectors were saying they found instances of Iraqi non-compliance with UN resolutions, but could not find evidence of active weapons programs. The US government insisted that it had such evidence. But instead of sharing everything we allegedly had with UNMOVIC and the IAEA so they could check it out, the governments of the US, UK, Spain, Australia, and a few others (Poland!) insisted on leaping ahead into a war.
One quibble with Matt’s statement: we actually did share our intelligence with UNMOVIC and the IAEA – it’s just that those groups couldn’t find anything based on our tips. From way back in 2003:
Hans Blix told the BBC that his teams followed up US and British leads at suspected sites across Iraq, but found nothing when they got there. [...]
In a BBC interview…Mr Blix said he had been disappointed with the tip-offs provided by British and US intelligence.
“Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say.”
He said UN inspectors had been promised the best information available.
“I thought – my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?”
This of course should have set off multiple alarms, and in a sense it did. Bush promptly yanked the inspectors and proceeded with the invasion.
And Bush’s gambit was successful in a sense: Many years later, it is “conventional wisdom” that “everybody” thought Saddam had WMD. That would be “everybody” except the actual inspectors on the ground in Iraq hunting down the hottest leads provided by US and British intel. Just those folks – but what did they know!
But I suppose that revisionist history is better than another resilient meme: that we went to war because Saddam didn’t let inspectors back in. Mitt Romney echoes this misinformation in a response during one of the GOP Presidential Debates in 2007 to a question asking: knowing what he knows now, was it a mistake to invade Iraq?:
Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that — or a null set — that is that if you’re saying let’s turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had open[ed] up his country to IAEA inspectors and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn’t be in the conflict we’re in. But he didn’t do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.
If only!
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