it amuses me to no end to see diehard iraq war supporters determined to prove that saddam hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. i'm not talking about the farcical allegations this week of my mentally challenged senator (apparently santorum doesn't know what "poor condition" and "are not in condition to be used as designed" means)
no, i'm talking about the people who are still clinging to the idea that saddam hussein had WMDs that were not decaying holdovers from before 1991. the ones who believe with all their might that he had the kind of weapons that the bush administration insisted he had back in 2003 and used to justify the iraq invasion. the reason i find it so amusing is because the proponents of this idea have completely lost track why WMDs were important in bush's case for war.
we didn't invade iraq to see if we could find WMDs there. we invaded iraq to secure the stockpiles of WMD bush already knew saddam had to make sure that they didn't fall into the hands of terrorists. get it? the existence of WMDs was not the question, it was the premise. to treat WMDs as the issue itself is to take a step backwards. the focus is not on securing weapons, it becomes whether those weapons existed in the first place. recognizing this difference is important because the shift seems to be quite misleading for a lot of people.
let's say the people insisting saddam had WMDs are right. that there were stockpiles of weapons or an active weapon program in 2002 or early 2003. if they're right, that doesn't mean the iraq war is justified. it means the war is a complete failure. if they existed, we still haven't secured them. meanwhile, over the past three years, iraq has fallen into chaos. members of the very terrorists groups we were supposed to keep from getting the weapons have poured into iraq over the past 3 years and are operating outside the control of the u.s. military or nascent iraqi government. if there were WMDs in iraq pre-invasion, they could be literally anywhere by now. they are definitely not secure, which means to the extent the mission was to secure them, the u.s. failed.
in short, the existence of WMDs in iraq in early 2003 doesn't mean the iraq war was a good idea after all. it means the mission was a failure; and a dangerous failure at that. if there were WMD stockpiles in iraq, we are a lot less safe now. if war supporters had any sense, they would be praying that WMDs never existed, not rooting for their discovery.
which is why the people like dave gaubatz are so amusing. they've turned WMDs into a kind of fetish. finding them once would have supported their position years ago. but now circumstances have changed and these days it really wouldn't.
(cross posted)
