Bush, Democrats, and Weapons of Mass Destruction (or lack thereof)

I’ve been tempted to write about the lack of discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for a week now, but every time I go to type something, I think, “The day I mock the administration for failing to find WMD is the day the stumble across Saddam’s arsenal.” Nevertheless, I’ve decided to take my chances.

The war is over, Hussein’s government is gone, and the battles were fairly brief. All of these truths are unquestionably good things for which I am grateful, despite my concerns about the war before it began.

The war, however, was about one very specific thing: Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Sure, the administration flirted with several different motivations for the invasion — humanitarian benefits, spreading democracy in the Middle East, concern for U.N. credibility — but the bottom line was always the WMD. As Ari Fleischer said on Jan. 30, “There is one thing the United States wants to see happen and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm. That’s what this is all about.” Indeed, up until the week before the invasion, Bush said a war could be avoided if Hussein gave up his weapons, which only helped to make clear Bush’s causus belli.

After listening to these reports for months, even I started to believe Iraq had vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. Colin Powell made a convincing case in February with a powerful presentation to the U.N. that strongly pointed to Iraq hiding just such an arsenal. “This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well documented,” Powell said. He added, “Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.”

Bush, in his State of the Union address in January, offered stunning details with amazing specificity — 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several mobile biological weapons labs, and an advanced nuclear weapons development program.

The administration used this threat to justify an unprovoked invasion. We have since seized control of Iraq and begun a diligent search for the alleged weapons deemed a threat to America. We haven’t found any thing. Not a gram of anthrax, not a vial of mustard gas, not a liter of botulinum toxin, not an ounce of nerve agent. Nothing. In fact, we’ve starting to give up on looking all together.

Some, including Pulitzer Prize wining columnist Thomas Friedman, have said the absence of the WMD program on which we predicated the war is irrelevant. Bush “doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue),” Friedman wrote.

For Friedman and others, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator. Iraq, and the rest of the world, is better off without him, whether we find proof of the alleged arsenal or not.

Yet, I can believe that Hussein’s fall is a good thing while remaining concerned about the nonexistent weapons arsenal that I was told threatened my life and the security of the world.

I’m sure the administration would prefer we all forget about his promises and assurances and just focus on how cool he looks in a flight suit as we enjoy the great tax cuts he’s pushing through Congress (assuming we’re multi-millionaires). But if the Bush White House committed America to war under false or fraudulent pretenses, then the people deserve an explanation — and a new president.

No matter what you think of Bush or the war in Iraq, one of four things is true: 1) Bush knew Iraq had no WMD and he lied to the world; 2) Bush truly believed in the threat and the U.S. experienced one of the most dramatic intelligence failures in history; 3) Saddam destroyed the WMD at the last minute to make the invasion appear unjustified; or 4) The WMD are still in Iraq and we just haven’t found them yet.

Unless #4 comes true really soon, our international credibility will suffer even more than it already has. Remember, U.N. resolution 1441 sent weapons inspectors back into Iraq to find these weapons. The world waited for Hans Blix to report that the intelligence U.S. officials pointed to was correct, but they found nothing. The U.N. MOVIC teams wanted to keep the weapons investigation going, but the Bush administration decided it didn’t matter anymore. We were going to war, proof or no proof.

Now that a month has passed since the end of fighting in Iraq, you might expect Democrats in Congress to be raising hell about this failure, at a minimum calling for hearings to determine how this mistake could happen in the first place. But instead the Dems remain silent. They want nothing to do with this issue.

The problem is Dems see the polls that say Bush has unprecedented credibility on the military/war issue, and they assume the road to success is placing emphasis on Bush’s overt weaknesses — the economy, health care, the environment, unemployment, etc.

I think it’s a mistake to cede any ground to Bush and the congressional GOP. Yes, Bush and the Republicans are viewed by the public as more reliable and trustworthy on national security issues. Does the GOP deserve this reputation? Absolutely not. Yet, Dems appear ready to simply give this issue to their political opponents, fait accompli.

The party needs a strong message to voters on this issue of great importance. If Republicans have been wrong on national security issues — and I believe they have been — Dems need to say so, loudly. They see the GOP’s strength on the issue in the polls as a deterrent? Do the Dems seriously believe the poll results will change if they hand the issue to the Republicans on a silver platter?

The irreplaceable Molly Ivins recently wrapped this up nicely. “Look, if there are no WMDs in Iraq, it means either our government lied us to us in order to get us into an unnecessary war, or the government itself was disastrously misinformed by an incompetent intelligence apparatus, Ivins wrote in a recent column. “In either case, it’s a terribly serious situation.”