Rhetorical Weapons

Where did Saddam's arsenal go?

So it turns out those Iraqi trailers might not have been intended for breeding deadly germs after all. A story in Saturday's New York Times reports that intelligence analysts disagree about whether the two trailers, discovered in April and May, should be viewed as evidence of an ongoing program to produce biological weapons.

Among other things, the skeptics wonder how Iraqi scientists could have sterilized the trailers' tanks, a necessary step in isolating useful microbes, without a steam generator or access to large quantities of water for flushing out chemical cleansers. Supporters of the weapon theory suggest that other vehicles might have supplied the missing capability. The dissenters concede the possibility but note the lack of evidence to support that view. The type of tank found in the trailers is "not built and designed as a standard fermenter," said one. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

By now this pattern is familiar: The Bush administration plays up evidence of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons that later turns out to be equivocal or nonexistent. It's possible, of course, that U.S. forces will turn up something more solid tomorrow or next week. But it seems unlikely.

Supporters of the war have begun to concede that the much-maligned former weapons inspector Scott Ritter may have been right: It looks like Iraq did not have a significant weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability. They are quick to add that it doesn't really matter—a contention that will come as a surprise to Americans who backed the war for the reasons offered by the Bush administration.

In the June 16 National Review (full text not online yet), Time military correspondent Jim Lacey calls the Pentagon's recent claims that it could take years to search Iraq for weapons "ridiculous." He suggests that "someone appears to be hedging the bet and hoping everyone forgets about the issue."

Lacey discusses several explanations for the failure to find WMDs: Maybe they were all buried in one small area; maybe they were all destroyed right before the invasion; maybe they were moved to Syria; maybe the Iraqis used a just-in-time system designed to manufacture weapons on short notice. He finds all the theories wanting, mainly because there's no evidence to support them.

But if Iraq had no WMDs to speak of, why did Saddam Hussein act like he had something to hide? With a U.S. invasion looming, why didn't he fully cooperate with U.N. inspectors and demonstrate his compliance with U.N. resolutions? Because, Lacey argues, he wanted to keep other countries in the region guessing about Iraq's true capabilities. "In that area of the world," he writes, "there is a tremendous strategic gain in convincing your neighbors that you are the baddest kid on the block."

Still, Lacey says, the war was justified because Saddam was an aggressive dictator who had used WMDs in the past and could decide to produce them again in the future. "The world is better off without that risk," he concludes.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likewise insists that Saddam's existing chemical or biological weapons were never the real issue, no matter what the Bush administration said. Friedman helpfully explains that there were four reasons for the war against Iraq: the stated reason (Saddam had WMDs and might give them to terrorists for an attack on the U.S.); the moral reason (saving Iraqis and their neighbors from a brutal, murderous tyranny); the real reason (after 9/11, the U.S. had to smack a Muslim country around to show it meant business); and the right reason (defusing the anger that leads to terrorism by transforming Iraq into a model of liberal democracy).

The first reason, we're now told, was bogus—although it's the one the administration pushed before the invasion and the one that most Americans found persuasive. The second reason, which became the main rationale once "Operation Iraqi Freedom" got started, has nothing to do with protecting U.S. security.

The third and fourth reasons are at least ostensibly connected to the fight against terrorism, but the precedents they set are troubling. One justifies war simply to demonstrate toughness, while the other sets an overly ambitious goal of engineering political revolutions across the Middle East, all in the name of making Americans safer. It's not hard to imagine how such policies could backfire, feeding rage and terrorism rather than dampening them.

Rhetorically, the main advantage of these rationales is that we'll never know for sure what the net effect of the invasion was. No matter how bad things get, supporters of the invasion can always argue that they would have been worse if the Ba'athists had remained in power. Compared to tracing all the causal ripples from this war, locating Saddam's disappearing weapons is like finding sand in the desert.