Justifications for war shifting like Iraqi sands

As the Bush administration continues to come up empty in its search for weapons of mass destruction, it's now turning to a fall-back position: toppling Saddam Hussein was justified for humanitarian reasons.

That argument was advanced sparingly before the war, because conservatives don't want to be world policemen, and because it suggests a long list of allies and trading partners — China, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan — also need regime changes.

And besides, the data used to buttress the humanitarian case came from liberal groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which had long tried — mostly in vain — to draw attention to the horrific brutality of Saddam. "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons," Bush said in his State of the Union speech in January, "has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

What the president did not mention was that this atrocity occurred 15 years ago — when Ronald Reagan was president and his father was vice president, and when Washington supported Iraq in its war against Iran.

A threat to our security?

Let's not too easily forget that George W. Bush urged us to support an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally frowned-upon pre-emptive war for the reason that the Saddam regime presented an imminent threat to our national security. (The Japanese justified their attack on Pearl Harbor in precisely the same way.)

"The Iraqi dictator," warned President Bush on Oct. 7, "must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."

It's now acknowledged that the nuclear part of this scare rested on what were known to be crudely forged documents. (Yet to be addressed: Who forged the documents, and toward what end?) The CIA now is loyally taking the blame for allowing uranium to creep into the president's State of the Union speech, but the misstatement doesn't exist in a vacuum. The alleged links between Saddam and Al-Qaida, and the alleged tons of biological and chemical weapons were also based on flimsy or outdated evidence.

Indeed, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the administration had no fresh intelligence about weapons of mass destruction before going to war.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9-11."

That's a shocking statement, given the administration's repeated citation, before the war, of new, persuasive evidence for WMD programs in Iraq. Does Rumsfeld not remember Secretary of State Colin Powell's impassioned presentation to the U.N. Security Council, complete with days-old telephone intercepts and aerial photos?

Weapons destroyed

If Rumsfeld had no new evidence of WMD in Iraq in the run-up to the war, then perhaps Hans Blix is right in suggesting that the reason WMDs aren't now being found is that the U.N. inspection regime was far more effective in eliminating them than the White House cares to admit. In the 1990s, the International Atomic Energy Agency mounted more than 1,000 inspections in Iraq, mostly without advance warning; sealed, expropriated, or destroyed tons of nuclear material; and destroyed thousands of square feet of nuclear facilities. In fact, its activities formed the baseline for virtually every intelligence assessment regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons.

Evidence thus mounts that Saddam was effectively weakened and constrained before the war, suggesting that the administration's concern was not any imminent threat, but rather a conviction of what Saddam would surely do, given half a chance. Plus the oil and geopolitical reasons that are never discussed.

Oh, yes — plus the new humanitarian argument.

'Pattern of deception'

Bush took office, John Judis and Spencer Ackerman conclude in an exhaustive study of the subject in the New Republic (June 30), "pledging to restore 'honor and dignity' to the White House. And it's true: Bush has not gotten caught having sex with an intern or lying about it under oath. But he has engaged in a pattern of deception ... "

The United States was not justified in going to war in Iraq "on the national security grounds that President Bush put forth throughout last fall and winter. He deceived Americans about what was known of the threat from Iraq and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war."

How long will Americans blandly accept this deception?