REMINDER FOR SOME ON WHY WE INVADED IRAQI

Great post by James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal:

Duelfer Damns U.N.
With a presidential election less than a month away and the press and the Democrats eager to discredit the Bush administration, most of what we've been hearing about the final report of Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, issued yesterday, has centered on the question of whether Saddam Hussein's regime possessed stockpiles of mass-destruction weapons. The U.S. and most other world intelligence services believed it did, and this was among the justifications for Iraq's liberation last year. The absence of such stockpiles is supposed to prove that the U.S.-led coalition was wrong to liberate Iraq--that Saddam Hussein did not deserve to be toppled and George W. Bush does not deserve to be re-elected.

It won't surprise anyone to learn that we disagree. This column has long supported the liberation of Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction were in our view at most a secondary part of the case (see here and here). To our mind, the main lesson to be drawn from the ISG report is that the United Nations is ill suited to manage international crises.

Consider where things stood preliberation. As we noted in January 2003, Saddam Hussein had been technically at war with the U.S. and "the world" for more than a decade. There was never a peace agreement to end the Gulf War, only a cease-fire conditional upon Saddam Hussein's compliance with 17 U.N. resolutions. These resolutions required not only that Saddam not possess weapons of mass destruction, but also that he prove to the world that he had destroyed all such weapons programs. Resolution 1441 enumerated his other obligations:

The Government of Iraq has failed to comply with its commitments pursuant to resolution 687 (1991) with regard to terrorism, pursuant to resolution 688 (1991) to end repression of its civilian population and to provide access by international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance in Iraq, and pursuant to resolutions 686 (1991), 687 (1991), and 1284 (1999) to return or cooperate in accounting for Kuwaiti and third country nationals wrongfully detained by Iraq, or to return Kuwaiti property wrongfully seized by Iraq.

The alternatives to military intervention were continuing the 12-year status quo, in which the U.N. applied sanctions designed to force compliance, or lifting the sanctions. In either case, the U.N.--and the U.S., had it continued to cooperate--would have been complicit in keeping this vicious dictator in power.

Twelve years of sanctions should have been enough to prove that they were ineffective in forcing Saddam to comply with his obligations--except, it now seems, for his obligation not to possess weapons of mass destruction. And of course because Saddam failed to verify the destruction of those weapons, he could not be trusted even on that score.

According to the Duelfer report (at page 63 of this PDF document), Saddam "used to say privately that the 'better part of war was deceiving,' according to Ali Hasan Al Majid," the Saddam henchman known as "Chemical Ali." The report says that al-Majid, in coalition custody since August 2003, "stated that Saddam wanted to avoid appearing weak and did not reveal he was deceiving the world about the presence of WMD."

The sanctions regime had the effect of punishing the Iraqi people while allowing Saddam to remain in power. Saddam was able to circumvent the sanctions by misusing the Oil for Food program. At the same time, he sought to end the sanctions by offering material inducements to sympathetic countries with permanent U.N. Security Council seats.

According to the report (pages 68-69 of the above PDF, which we've reproduced here), Saddam's regime "sought a relationship with Russia to engage in extensive arms purchases and to gain support for lifting the sanctions," and "in order to induce France to aid in getting sanctions lifted, [Baghdad] targeted friendly companies and foreign political parties that possessed either extensive business ties to Iraq or held pro-Iraqi positions."

Had sanctions been lifted, the report makes clear, Saddam was preparing to rebuild his weapons capabilities. "According to Abd Hamid Mahmud [his private secretary], Saddam privately told him that Iraq would reacquire WMD post-sanctions" (page 76). "Saddam asked in 1999 how long it would take to build a production line for CW [chemical weapons] agents, according to the former Minister of Military Industrialization. . . . An Iraqi CW expert separately estimated Iraq would require only a few days to start producing mustard--if it was prepared to sacrifice the production equipment" (page 88).

The end of sanctions might have meant a nuclear-armed Iraq. "Saddam would have restarted WMD programs, beginning with the nuclear program, after sanctions, according to [Deputy Prime Minister] Tariq Aziz. Saddam never formally stated this intention, according to Aziz, but he did not believe other countries in the region should be able to have WMD when Iraq could not. Aziz assessed that Iraq could have a WMD capability within two years of the end of sanctions" (page 80).

If President Bush had decided not to liberate Iraq without yet another U.N. resolution, it seems clear that Saddam's coalition of the bribed would have continued to balk. The Iraqi people would have continued suffering under dictatorship or sanctions, while Saddam bluffed the world by pretending to have weapons of mass destruction.

Had the sanctions been lifted, Saddam likely would have acquired such weapons for real. Given that he had used them in the past, against both Iranians and Iraqi Kurds, there's no assurance he would have employed them only as a "deterrent"--or that he would not have given them to terrorists.

As it is, Saddam is in prison, and Iraq is disarmed and moving toward democracy. Can there be any doubt that America is safer--or that it would imperil both America and the world if a president were to subject U.S. national security to a "global test"?