Last Friday, he took another look at the reasons why America went to war in Iraq. Of the several reasons for war, he briefly considers three of them:
For humanitarian reasons, to liberate the Iraqis from a brutal dictatorship...Dismissing all three, along with oil, dad and Armageddon, he concludes:
Because Iraq posed a serious threat to the United States or, more broadly, to the stability of the Persian Gulf...
Because we need a large and extended military presence in the heart of the Middle East as a platform to reform the Arab world...
I just don't know, and it drives me nuts. As Paul Krugman says in The Great Unraveling, the more you look at the Bush administration the more you feel like a "crazy conspiracy theorist." And who wants to be a crazy conspiracy theorist?Well, Kevin Drum can sign up to crazy conspiracy theories if he wants, but maybe instead he should just take a look at that second reason he considered: "Because Iraq posed a serious threat to the United States or, more broadly, to the stability of the Persian Gulf."
Not me, if I can help it. But maybe I should be.
He rejects these two related causes by saying that "the former has never been plausible, and even the latter is speculative at best." I beg to differ.
Let me be cynical for a moment and suggest that, whatever the underlying motivation for war, the reason we went to war with Iraq was because the Bush administration judged that it could convince the majority of the American people, and a handful of significant allies, that a nuclear-armed Iraq posed a serious threat to stability in the Middle East and to American interests at home and abroad.
It worked.
And you know what? To be realistic about it, the administration didn't have to try too hard to convince me that this was the case. Iraq had a clandestine, but functioning, nuclear program and it had become clear, after over a decade of working through the United Nations, that inspections backed up by UN security council resolutions were not going to force Iraq to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Of course France, Germany and Russia had a different view (they also have different strategic interests) and they repeatedly argued that we should give the inspections time to work. But the problem with giving Iraq more time was the fear of "leakage". More time meant increasing the risk of proliferation by allowing the opportunity for the transfer of Iraqi nuclear knowledge and technology to other nations, both in the Middle East and further afield.
Whatever the links between the former Iraqi regime and the Al-Qaeda network, the events of two years ago brought home to Americans the fact that there are people in the world who, if they obtained a nuclear weapon, would not hesitate to use it against one of our cities.
This was not a war against terrorism or for democracy or human rights or oil. It was, and still is, a war against proliferation.
Five years ago, President Clinton understood the situation when he launched the December 16 strikes against Iraq:
Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors; he will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them. Because we are acting today, it is less likely that we will face these dangers in the future.Five months after the fall of Baghdad and some people say they still don't get it.
Frightening.
