Алистер Смит - The Spoils of War - Greed, Power, and the Conflicts That Made Our Greatest Presidents

President Bush decided that he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein’s regime. The heightened fear of plots against the United States that followed 9/11 gave him an opportunity to engineer a war. Unlike the reluctant Johnson, Bush actively sought a conflict with Iraq. For him the problem was gaining sufficient support to enact a policy that he wanted and that the majority at the time did not. There are strong parallels between Bush and James Madison and the War Hawks of 1812. They, too, sought war, in their case with Britain to achieve territorial expansion, and, like Bush, they needed to find “legitimate” issues on which to mobilize support for the war they desired.

In Chapter 2, we explained that the 1812 War Hawks pointed to impressment of US seamen and British interference with America’s Atlantic trade as the top two grievances against the United Kingdom even as these issues were already being resolved. Their actual reasons for wanting war resided in the War Hawks’ urge to absorb Canada and to take lands from the Indians. In the case of the Iraq War the legitimate motivations for fighting so far from home became both an obscure and a moving target. We cannot be sure what the “real” justification for the war against Iraq was. We tend to think that President Bush, like President Madison, believed that war would help him with his reelection prospects. We certainly know that Bush floated numerous justifications until he found reasons that people would rally behind. In arguing for the need to depose Saddam Hussein, who had managed to survive in power despite the utter defeat of Iraq’s army at the hands of 43’s father, Bush the son pointed to (1) Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), (2) Iraq’s support for global terrorism, and (3) Saddam Hussein’s generally oppressive regime.

The WMD Gambit

TO GAIN BOTH DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT, BUSH PUSHED the case that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Although his administration accused Saddam Hussein of many foul things—from creating regional instability to violating human rights through the use of oppression within Iraq (certainly an accurate charge), from supporting terrorists to simply being a madman—the claim that the Iraqi government was developing WMD and was intent on using them gained the most traction both with the American public and the international community. Indeed, although Bush offered many casus belli, he focused on the alleged WMD threat in making his primary case for war. In his 2002 State of the Union Address, the president identified Iraq as a member of an “axis of evil”:

The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.24

Bush’s arguments were strongly couched, designed to raise fear of Saddam Hussein’s threat to the American people and the nation’s friends in the world. Although many today scoff at his contention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction—none were found during or after the 2003 war—still on the face of it at the time, the claim, at least for nonnuclear WMD, was entirely plausible. During the Gulf War of 1991, the victors discovered large quantities of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq’s arsenal, including anthrax, botulin toxin, mustard gas, and nerve gas. Furthermore, Iraq’s written records showed more such warheads than were actually discovered, meaning that some such weapons apparently were still lurking around somewhere. Still, by 2003 the evidence for the idea that these weapons still existed had become thin. Naturally, there were many demands for more evidence. Against these demands, Bush assured congressional legislators that there was definitive evidence of WMD and in October Congress voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq with a yea vote of 297 to a nay vote of 133 in the House and 77 to 23 votes in the Senate. These vote totals suggest far less appetite for war than the votes in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the run-up to Vietnam, but still it was a strongly bipartisan vote in support of action against Saddam Hussein’s government. Nearly all Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted in favor of the war, as did a majority of Senate Democrats and a large minority—40 percent or so—of House Democrats. All this represented a vastly more bipartisan vote than the decision to declare war on Britain in 1812, when virtually all Democrat-Republicans voted in favor and the Federalists lined up against.

The dearth of hard evidence notwithstanding, still Bush pressed the case for military intervention based on the threat of Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In the interest of slowing progress toward war, the international community wanted the issue referred to the United Nations. Although the president initially resisted, he eventually agreed. On November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 that offered Hussein’s government a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations issued under previous UNSC resolutions. Iraq agreed to admit weapons inspectors from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although there were great inconsistencies between Iraqi declarations and what the inspectors found, still the inspectors found little conclusive evidence of WMD.

This presented a problem for the Bush administration. When pushed on the issue of WMD, the head of the CIA, George Tenet, assured Bush, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.”25 However, in reality the administration’s evidence was shaky and circumstantial. Sometimes it resorted to devious methods to maximize the impact of the evidence it had. For instance, it would leak stories to newspapers and then reference these stories as evidence to support its case.26 No significant cache of WMD was found after the invasion. In March 2005 a presidential commission filled with people sympathetic to the Bush administration produced a damning report on intelligence failures:

We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure. Its principal causes were the Intelligence Community’s inability to collect good information about Iraq’s WMD programs, serious errors in analyzing what information it could gather, and a failure to make clear just how much of its analysis was based on assumptions, rather than good evidence. On a matter of this importance, we simply cannot afford failures of this magnitude.

After a thorough review, the Commission found no indication that the Intelligence Community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein’s programs was what they believed. They were simply wrong. . . .

Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs.27

The inconclusive reports of the weapons inspections failed to provide the smoking gun Bush sought. The delays created by the process also imposed difficulties as US forces amassed in neighboring countries. Many nations—the French were particularly vociferous advocates—thought the issue should again be referred to the United Nations. But President Bush was not keen for further delay. He did not need wide ranging domestic and international support for the war he proposed to fight; he just sought enough support at home and abroad to justify his actions at the time the US forces would be in place. Congress had granted its approval. Now all he required was sufficient international backing to support his plans. To get that international backing, he sent his secretary of state, Colin Powell, to make the administration’s case before the UN General Assembly on February 6, 2003: