WMDs and Hitchens
I know I should stop talking about the rationales for, or causes of, the U.S. war in Iraq. It is the present and future that matter, and many wise people think we must all hope for the greatest possible U.S. success in what they have started--however exactly they started it.
Still, I can't resist the changing stories. When will someone really try to clarify for us all when Saddam last had effective WMDs? What year? Was it 1998, when Clinton bombed? (Clinton himself has said he fully believed there were WMDs at the time, and it was unlikely that the bombs got them all). 1995? 1993?
Christopher Hitchens is a very clever individual. He has made a name for himself by his attacks on Mother Theresa, and he has picked fights with his left-wing former friends. Now he is all for Bush's war and foreign policy.
Here is Hitchens' latest--still defending Bush throughout on this issue; Saddam was both an unusually terrible tyrant and unusually threatening to his neighbours, and to the U.S. What about WMDs?
"The counsel of prudence offered above by Bush [Senior] and Scowcroft was all very well as far as it went. But it did leave Saddam Hussein in power, and it did (as its authors elsewhere concede) involve the United States in watching from the sidelines as Iraqis were massacred for rebelling on its side and in its name. It left the Baathist regime free to continue work on weapons of mass destruction, which we know for certain it was doing on a grand scale until at the very least 1995. And it left Saddam free to continue to threaten his neighbors and to give support and encouragement to jihad forces around the world."
According to Hitchens in November, then, Saddam's regime was working on WMDs at least up until 1995.
Here is Hitchens in May: "I did write before the war, and do state again (in my upcoming Slate/Penguin-Plume book) that obviously there couldn't have been very many weapons in Saddam's hands, nor can the coalition have believed there to be. You can't station tens of thousands of men and women in uniform on the immediate borders of Iraq for several months if you think that a mad dictator might be able to annihilate them with a pre-emptive strike."
In other words, U.S. officials must not have believed there were any WMDs to speak of at the time of the invasion, or their behaviour would have been crazy. Has Hitchens changed his story?
Were there WMDs in Iraq shortly before the U.S. invasion, and did the Bush administration think there were?
When, according to Hitchens in May, did Saddam most likely ditch his WMDs, and why? During the UN debates in 2002-03, and mainly if not solely because of the imminent (there's that word again) threat of a U.S. attack.
"Thus if nothing has been found so far, and if literally nothing (except the mobile units predicted and described by one defector) is found from now on, it will mean that the operation was a success. The stuff must have been destroyed, or neutralized, or work on it must have been abandoned during the long grace period that was provided by the U.N. debates."
So: did Saddam still have WMDs at the beginning of 2002, so that they only disappeared since then? Or is it more believable to say he had them in 1995, and possibly not since, or not since 1998 at the latest? Is it possible he hasn't had much of anything since 1993?
How could a country with the biggest and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world be forced back to the crudest guesses about this? How could U.S. officials not know?
And while I'm at it: why doesn't some enterprising reporter find out what happened to the Iraqi air force? There was one during Gulf War I, although much of it was moved to another country for safekeeping. What happened to it? In its absence, Iraqi troops, if they didn't simply run for it, were sitting ducks for U.S. and British air strikes, with the result that Coalition ground forces hardly encountered an enemy in uniform.
What about Iraqi tanks? What exactly happened to them? Is it true that many of them were destroyed in 1991, and Saddam was never able to replace them?
What about Stinger and other anti-aircraft missiles, initially supplied by the U.S. to the mujahadeen for the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan? Why have so few of those put in an appearance, in either Afghanistan or Iraq? (One may finally have appeared in the last week).
Oops: I got one detail wrong. The one anti-aircraft missile that has actually been deployed against the U.S. in recent days was apparently a Soviet-made one: "The Chinook that was shot down last Sunday is believed to have been felled by an SA-7, a Soviet-designed weapon that is stockpiled in some 70 countries."
Update: According to Fred Kaplan in Slate in May: "The Iraqis [during the "combat" period] fired their anti-aircraft artillery 1,224 times and launched 1,660 surface-to-air missiles. As a result, they put out of action six helicopters and a single A-10." Kaplan stresses here that the U.S. campaign was not as "smart" as the public were led to believe; much of it consisted of dropping old-fashioned bombs on civilians and soldiers.
Update Nov. 9: One big story now is that mass graves are being investigated in Iraq. There may be as many as 263, with remains of as many as 300,000 people. Question: when is the last year any bodies are likely to have been added to these mass graves?
"[Sandra] Hodgkinson (Director of Human Rights, Coalition Provisional Authority] said the majority of people buried in the mass graves are believed to be Kurds killed by Saddam in the 1980s after rebelling against the government and Shiites killed after an uprising following the 1991 Gulf War."
So it is possible that no bodies had been added after 1993?
The larger question is this: was Saddam's regime getting steadily worse, so that some kind of cataclysmic event was inevitable, and drawing closer (if not exactly imminent)?; or was the worst period 1991-1993, and had things perhaps gotten better, both for the people of Iraq and for Iraq's neighbours, for 10 years or so before the U.S. invasion? Was it only or primarily the sanctions (for which the Iraqi people paid a high price) that imposed some kind of moderation on Saddam?
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