Let's get this straight once and for all

Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose has been waging a rear-guard defense of the so-called “Serious” foreign policy scholars and commentators who were cheerleaders for the war.

. . . . even knowledgeable professionals who were opposed to the war generally thought Iraq had dangerous prohibited weapons programs—they just disagreed over how to handle the problem.

Let’s get this straight once and for all: what somebody thought in August 2002 has nothing whatsoever to do with what he or she thought by March 19, 2003 when the invasion was launched. What may have been reasonable in August 2002 was not reasonable in March 2003. In August 2002, I was not quite ready to think the President of the United States of America and the Vice President of the United States of America would outright lie through their teeth. I didn’t know much yet about the Project for the New American Century, neoconservatives in their most recent formulation, and the like. So I vaguely thought, My God, if that’s true we need to do something about it. But over the following months, severe doubts were being cast publicly on one confidently-declared “fact” after another. UPI reported on the doubts of experts about the aluminum tubes September 20, 2002. The Administration launched a campaign of repeating the term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” like an advertising slogan, with sudden virtual abandonment of the word “nuclear,” suggesting strongly to anyone listening that we were being subjected to the techniques of an advertising or PR campaign. Colin Powell’s allusions to yellowcake and the mobile biological weapons labs were discredited just a few days after his UN speech.

So let’s get this straight once and for all: by the third week of March, 2003, seven full months after Cheney gave his baldly lying “no doubt” speech, nobody Serious could possibly have believed with sufficient confidence to justify launching a pre-emptive war that Saddam had nuclear weapons or a functioning nuclear weapons program. There were serious, publicly-revealed reasons to doubt whether Saddam had any nuclear weapons, any nuclear weapons program, or any other WMD of significance. For the very reason that the serious, substantive doubts contrasted so sharply with the expressions of absolute certainty, there was substantial indication that the Administration had been engaged in a sustained public relations campaign – which should not have been needed if the facts supported the claims. France and Germany, presumably privy within NATO channels to more shared intelligence, had resisted, whereas in the Gulf War and the Balkan wars, France was an active partner with the U.S. The claims that Saddam was working with bin Laden were repudiated. The fact that the “doubts” stories were placed on page A47 or wherever suggested that at least the Washington Post might be colluding with the Administration. And finally, the UN inspectors, who in December had been let back in by Saddam with unacceptable conditions, had declared over a month before the invasion that they now had access to any place of their choosing in Iraq without restrictions.

So let’s get this straight once and for all again: before Bush launched the war, at a time when he was baldly lying that war could still be avoided, there were very serious public doubts about the claims that Saddam had WMDs or WMD programs. This means, simply, that nobody who wants to be considered a Serious Foreign Policy scholar or commentator could possibly support an invasion at that point. There was one and only one legitimate position: that we did not know what the situation was, and, accordingly, that we should hold off from any military action at least as long as Hans Blix was allowed to continue the inspections to a satisfactory conclusion. We knew for a fact that we did not know. We knew for a fact that a lot of what we had believed was simply false.