The WMD Conundrum

Responsible people all over the world are wondering what ever happened to Iraq’s WsMD (to put it in Note-ese). Irresponsible right-wing ideologues, on the other hand, can’t be bothered to care. They like to make an argument (to see how much they like to make it, check out this insanely long Calpundit comment thread) about why it’s not a problem that we haven’t found them, which goes something like this:

1. Iraq had a weapons program and a stockpile of weapons as of 1998; Clinton said so.
2. Therefore, Iraq had the same program and stockpile in 2003.
3. We haven’t found the weapons, and should patiently wait to find them, even though:
4. We had to go to war right away to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, and:
5. If only we had gone to war sooner, we would have found them already, and:
6. It doesn’t matter anyway, because Saddam was a Very Bad Man, and also, We Won.

The logical inconsistency of this case for blithe WMD unconcern ought to be immediately apparent. The only thing that keeps WMD apologists standing on any kind of leg, however rickety, is that they usually don’t make the whole argument at once. They stretch it out: a ‘Clinton said so too!’ here, a ‘France is to blame’ there—but that just makes them dishonest partisan hacks, not clever or right.

Here’s how I see it. There are four major possibilities:

1. Iraq had an active WMD development program at the start of the war, and significant stockpiles of weapons.
2. Iraq had significant stockpiles of weapons, but no active WMD development program to produce more weapons.
3. Iraq had an active WMD development program, but no significant stockpiles of weapons.
4. Iraq had neither an active WMD development program, nor significant stockpiles of weapons.

Bush’s public statements indicate a desire to convince the public of (1); this was our casus belli: Iraq must be prevented from giving WMD to terrorists. Bush administration officials repeatedly expressed certainty that Iraq had significant weapons and an ongoing program; which is understandable, because without at least one of those, the danger that Iraq would export weapons would be nil, and they would not get to have a war that they clearly wanted, WMD or no.

The best public evidence to date points to case (4); no weapons or production facilities have been found; no weapons were used. All public statements from Iraqis indicate no program was running, many say weapons were destroyed by 1998. But we really don’t know, and in fact, probably never could know that case (4) was the truth, since the possibility of someone finding a few hundred drums in a hole somewhere will always be non-zero. Iraq did once have at least chemical arms, and we genuinely don’t know what happened to them.

That should frighten you.

If the Bush administration was correct and (1) or (2) is the case, I see four possibilities for the situation today:

1. There really are weapons, hidden away, we haven’t found them, and no-one else has either.
2. Weapons were transported to 3rd country.
3. Weapons were given to terrorists.
4. Weapons were found by someone else, who is not likely to have good plans in mind for them.

The only one of these options that should not scare the hell out of you is option (a). In any other case, the war caused proliferation of WMD, the very thing it was supposedly fought to prevent, and so was a catastrophic failure.

Case (3) offers somewhat more hope, because program components can’t be as easily transported, and of course the program would have to be reconstituted to produce actual weapons. So if it’s (3), then I can see only this likely possibility:

1. Program constituents are hidden away, we haven’t found them yet.

This is the best-case scenario for Bush, politically, if no-one comes to the realization that empirically, we can’t tell this from any of the possibilities above; and in fact, finding the components of an active program but no weapons would make it seem much more likely that the weapons themselves had eluded us.

Lastly, case (4) . If there are no weapons and no active program, then it’s one of:

1. Bush knowingly lied.
2. Bush had a good-faith but wrong belief, and made an “innocent mistake”.
3. Bush had a good-faith, wrong belief, because he was mislead by bad intelligence or duped by advisers with “hidden” agendas.

I have no idea which of those is most likely, or which of them would be worse to imagine. However, it’s clear that case (4) is the only case in which we can be certain that no WsMD from Iraq are now in Osama’s hands, and so, this is the case I am rooting for.

Last, a question. Given the lack of positive evidence for WsMD in Iraq, on what is Bush’s often-stated certainty that they exist based?

Filed under: politics/war