A canard of worms

In a comment to this post, Rick Esenberg proclaims:

…peace activists did not understand the situation in Iraq. The official policy of both the Clinton and Bush administrations was that Saddam was a threat and should be removed. The consensus of all intelligence agencies and the weight of the evidence was that he had WMDs. The fact was that he was not in compliance with UN resolutions or the terms of the Gulf War cease fire. The fact was that the containment regime was following apart and both Saddam and the UN had coopted the oil for food program. The fact was that Saddam provided support for terrorist organizations (although there is no evidence that he was involved in 9-11 and the President did not claim he was.)

The response of the peace activists was to demand an end to sanctions.

Commenting further at his site, James Wigderson writes:

It is always the interesting question that never gets asked. What would they have done? Worse than nothing, the political left was actually working to undermine what little anti-Iraq coalition cohesion there was prior to the invasion. That one aspect of Iraq's threat capabilities were overstated is missing the entire strategic point. Yet that thin reed is what the Left clings to in an effort to discredit what is trying to be done in Iraq.

The great irony is that we may achieve military and political success just in time to make a President Obama's timetable for withdrawal possible. You know, after he tweaks it a bit.

First, the assertion that there was a consensus opinion that Saddam Hussein had WMDs is just flat out wrong. The UN’s team of weapons inspectors, divided into groups searching for nuclear and biological materials were finding nothing. In their final reports to the Security Council, they asked for more time to confirm their findings. Their reports were disregarded by the Bush administration.

Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41’s National Security Advisor, was publicly arguing against an invasion at the time. So were the millions of people marching in the streets, including hundreds of thousands of Americans, who were demanding that the Bush administration not invade Iraq.

There was also then the opposition of largely unknown state senator from Illinois. I detail a lot of this here.

As for the oil for food program, much of the resistance from activists had to do with the evidence that it was having a deleterious affect on Iraq’s children and none on Saddam Hussein himself. It seems hardly radical to suggest that a failed policy be dropped.

James asks: “What would they have done?” And the response is: About what?

Hussein was at the front of no invading army. He was launching no missiles against his neighbors. His support for terrorism seemed limited to sending funds to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The price that has been paid in lives and treasure for such an affront seems wildly disproportionate.

Was Hussein at the head of brutal regime? Well, of course he was. No one denies that. But if punishing totalitarian regimes with weapons of mass destruction is so important, one has to ask why President Bush is being careful to not offend the Chinese in his decision to attend the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

At this point, the war is more about what we do now than what happened. As to the first question, the Iraqis, bowing to domestic political realities in the United States, seem ready to set a timetable for withdrawal.

But when the question of what happened in Iraq is considered by historians and others, we’ll need an honest accounting of the facts.

And those facts demonstrate that it was the peace activists who got it right.