Yes, we were fortunate, because the whole obsession with weapons of mass destruction was a red herring, a political fraud of immense proportions, bought into by virtually the entire Washington political establishment. After all, it can’t be a lie if everyone thinks it’s true, correct?
It all goes back to Iraq Attack I. Nothing succeeds like success, of course, but still it remains astonishing in retrospect how effectively George H.W., James Baker and their gang erased all traces of their former policy, and obscured essential features of their current policy, when they went to war with Saddam Hussein. Two recent books on the Middle East, Kenneth Pollack’s The Persian Puzzle and David Crist’s The Twilight War—which I previously discussed here, amply document the U.S.’s heavy involvement in the war between Iraq and Iran, which ran from September 1980 through August 1988 and which, of course, Hussein started in a pure act of aggression. Both Pollack and Crist argue that U.S. involvement quite probably saved Hussein from defeat, supplying him with invaluable information on Iranian troop movements. In addition, the U.S. navy actively and aggressively patrolled the Persian Gulf, to prevent Iran from halting shipments of Iraqi oil. While the U.S. was supporting Iraq, Hussein was using both nerve and mustard gas against Iranian troops, killing over 20,000 of them with these agents and leaving thousands more permanently injured. In March of 1988, Hussein launched a chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing at least 3,000 and injuring thousands more, most of them civilians. Overall, Hussein’s campaigns against the Kurds resulted in perhaps 200,000 deaths, most of them civilian, and most of them outright murders rather than “battlefield casualties.”
Despite this brutal record of both possession and use of chemical weapons and civilian slaughter, the U.S. remained on cordial terms with Saddam, even after the war with Iran was over. When Hussein was making noises about invading Kuwait (he claimed that after “defending” Arab nations against Persian aggression he deserved to be rewarded, and it appeared that Kuwait was dragging its heels), George H.W. Bush had his ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, speak with Hussein. In the interview, Glaspie listens to Hussein whine about how Kuwait isn’t being nice to him and that Iraq is running out of patience. Glaspie responds by assuring him that President Bush wants to “deepen and broaden” the United States’ relationship with Iraq, with the man whom he would be denouncing a few months later as “the worst since Hitler.”
I don’t really know why Bush reacted so violently to the Iraqi invasion. Perhaps he felt he’d been set up. Maybe it was blow back from the Saudis, in full Nervous Nellie, let George do it mode, or the American oil companies, or the British (supposedly, Maggie Thatcher came by to give George a lecture on how it was wrong to steal). There were lots of reasons, but one of them was surely the desire to discard the “burden” of Vietnam, to remind Americans that invading other countries can be fun. Bush had already tried this in Panama, hassling another former client, General Noriega. The results had been a little sloppy, but, overall, worth it. Now that we had had some practice in our own hemisphere, it was time to take Uncle Sam’s act on the world stage.
Well, nothing does succeed like success. The U.S. media was overwhelmed by the spectacle of American might, which made war look just like a movie. So what if we were attacking someone we’d supplied with aid while he was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians? Look at those rockets! How cool is that?
A great deal of dirt got swept under the rug in the aftermath of our famous victory. Operation Kick Ass had been planned as an exercise in realpolitik. Saddam would be punished, but not overthrown. As Secretary of State James Baker explained afterwards, deposing Hussein might lead to the breakup of Iraq, leading to any number of unforeseeable and undesirable consequences. Better the devil you know. But as D-Day approached, Bush switched the emphasis from realpolitik to moral crusade, fearing the blame he would receive if the war were to prove bloodier than expected. He encouraged Iraqi minorities to believe that their day of freedom was approaching, a day that he and Baker had already decided would not come. After the fighting stopped, the U.S. stood by and watched as Hussein crushed Shiite and Kurdish rebellions against his rule.
As Bush and the Republican Party discovered in 1992, victory can be dangerous: you aren’t needed any more. With the Cold War over, and Hussein defeated, American voters wanted a domestic President, not a world leader. It didn’t take long for right-wingers to figure out that they needed a new war. The Iranians had done pretty well with that Great Satan thing. Maybe Uncle Sam needed one too!
It was in the search for the Great Satan that the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” was born. Hussein himself, with his constant pursuit of a wide variety of biological and chemical weapons—not to mention his actual use of both nerve and mustard gas—deserves much of the blame. The man was an ogre of the first water. But however repulsive they are, these agents are not, in fact, weapons of mass destruction. While horrible, they are not reliable, and they are dangerous to work with. It is a frequently overlooked fact that no terrorist group has ever used them. Most terrorist groups, I suspect, would not use them if they could, for fear of both self-contamination and public reaction. The “madman” Saddam Hussein could surely figure out what would happen to him if he gave nerve gas to the PLO and they used it on Israeli civilians. And, I suspect, the PLO itself would never use such agents. Somehow, killing schoolchildren with nerve gas is “worse” than killing them with explosives.
In its war on détente back in the Seventies, the American Right had learned the joy of lying for truth. They pressured the Ford Administration into allowing the infamous “Team B” report, which grotesquely overestimated the Soviet Union’s intentions and capabilities, relying on such forms of analysis as “lack of evidence is proof”—for example, since there was no evidence that the USSR had acoustic means of detecting U.S. submarines, that proved that they had developed non-acoustic means of doing so, despite the fact that there was no evidence that this technology existed either.
But facts didn’t matter, did they? Ford was out in ’76, Ronnie was in in ’80, and the Berlin Wall was down in ’89. What’s not to like?
If you get away with cheating once, the odds are pretty good that you’ll cheat again. Of course, there were differences between the Soviets in the Seventies and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Nineties. The Soviets had thousands of nuclear weapons, thousands of ICBMs, and soaring oil revenues. Hussein had no nukes, no ICBMs, oil prices were sliding into the cellar, and the army that he did have had been crushed in one of the most one-sided wars in history. But that didn’t matter. The Right revved up its propaganda machine once more, with new committees, reports, articles, ads, think tanks and speeches. The WMD, which were not WMD in the first place, and which Saddam did not have in the second place, became a Beltway obsession and stayed that way throughout the Nineties. The 1994 congressional elections energized conservatives, who loathed Bill Clinton and everything he stood for, and were happy for any club with which to beat him. And beat him they did.
Bill Clinton was not the man to fight the myth of the new Great Satan. There were no votes in talking sense about foreign policy or defense. Liberals weren’t interested. The Republicans owned those issues. A smart Democrat gave the Pentagon everything it asked for, and kept his mouth shut.
Anyway, there were plenty of liberal interventionists as well—not only liberal neo-cons at the New Republic, but big power liberals like Madeleine Albright, not at all averse to a moral crusade or two overseas, as long as it didn’t result in the loss of American lives. Clinton was happy to find a “middle way” between the Right and the isolationist liberals, endlessly hounding Hussein with inspections and “tough” sanctions, which seemed to offer the moral rewards of war without all the bloodshed. Hussein, of course, deftly transferred the burden of the sanctions from himself to the Iraqi people. In an infamous interview in 1996, Leslie Stahl asked Albright if the sanctions, which supposedly cost the lives of half a million children, “had been worth it,” Albright remarkably and stupidly said “yes,” pathetically defending sanctions that had no point, using a sort of “we had to kill the children in order to save them” logic that exposes the actual pointlessness of the sanctions, maintained for domestic political—“we’re tough too!”—rather than foreign policy reasons, even as we maintain “tough” sanctions on Iran today, our new “Great Satan,” whose nuclear weapons, never here but always on the way, constitute the new King Charles’ head of American politics.*
Clinton’s spinelessness, Albright’s aggressiveness, and relentless right-wing pressure kept the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” alive and well throughout the Nineties. Somehow, Saddam Hussein, the man who, President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State James Baker, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had all deliberately kept in power, became, not the worst since Hitler, but worse than Hitler. In the 2000 presidential primaries, Dan Quayle (remember him?) “promised” that, if elected, he would somehow make Saddam go away in his first term. After 9/11, the new administration immediately embarked on a great crusade against the “Axis of Evil,” three nations that had little to do with one another and nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
Even if Saddam had had chemical or biological agents, which he did not, he never would have used them on the U.S. He was not, as George W. Bush hysterically charged, a madman. He was a fool who started wars he could not win. And, in that respect, he was much like George Bush.
Afterwards
As we now know, if we did not know before, the War in Iraq was about oil, Israel, and politics. The “Oil Right”—men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—felt that the U.S. should take over the Middle East to avoid being jerked around by Iraqis, Iranians, and Saudis. The Likudist Right—men like Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol—believed that a U.S. army permanently stationed in the Middle East would protect Israel. The Right in general believes that only a constant foreign threat—a new Cold War—can keep the U.S. from turning into a nation of pot-smoking, omnisexual lotus-eaters.
The Bush Administration went to war above all because they believed that war is freedom. They wanted to kill their foes abroad and intimidate them at home. And they brought with them disaster. “History will judge us harshly,” said John Ashcroft, in a rare moment of percipience. But up to now, history has not judged them half so harshly enough.
*Stahl’s “half million dead kids” factoid was, of course, complete nonsense. Reason’s Matt Welch ably separates sense from nonsense in “The Politics of Dead Children”. The “King Charles’ head” reference is probably over the head of anyone unfamiliar with David Copperfield. The sweet-tempered, kite-flying, addle-pated Mr. Dick found that, no matter what he wrote, King Charles’ head kept popping into it (Charles I was beheaded by the Puritans in the course of the English Civil War).
