The more important point of the Iraqi WMD debate

Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, was not a neutral observer in the months leading up to the latest war in Iraq. One of the nation’s leading neo-cons, Kristol enthusiastically endorsed the war strategy and message, chastising Democrats and liberals who opposed the war for their misguided values.

Over the weekend, however, Kristol offered an interesting concession: doubt.

On the Fox News Channel of all places, Kristol admitted that the Bush administration made a series of important claims about the nature of the Iraqi threat, but not all of them were necessarily true.

“We shouldn’t deny, those of us who were hawks, that there could have been misstatements made, I think in good faith,” Kristol said. He added, “”I hope [the WMDs] are found, but I’m very skeptical.”

Sounding an awful lot like many Bush critics, Kristol went on to say, “We have interrogated a lot of people and we haven’t found a single person who said he participated in disposing, destroying the stock of weapons of mass destruction. Or in hiding them.”

This is no small confession. Bill Kristol is as important a conservative journalist as there is in America. His magazine is, right now, the most widely-read and influential conservative publication in Washington. For Kristol to say, on national television, that the White House may have made “misstatements” about WMD in Iraq and he’s “skeptical” that we’ll find the alleged evidence, is fairly shocking.

But here’s the kicker: Kristol also acknowledged the point that Bush critics must emphasize to be effective in this policy debate. Bush didn’t just base the invasion on WMD, he based the war’s immediacy and urgency on them.

“People like me, who were hawks, said the war was both just, prudent and urgent,” Kristol said. “I think just and prudent — fine. But it is fair to say that if we don’t find serious weapons of mass destruction capabilities, the case for urgency, which Bush and Blair certainly articulated, is going to be undercut to some degree.”

Exactly. I don’t know if Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons lying around before the war, and I don’t know if our troops will suddenly discover a vial of anthrax in Tikrit tomorrow. It’s important, but there’s a larger point.

It’s worth reviewing why we went to war in the first place. Bush said Iraq is a dictatorship, which is true, but there are lots of dictatorships in the world. Bush said Hussein was brutally abusing the Iraqi people, which is also true, but there are lots of vile tyrants in the world. Bush said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which may or may not be true, but unfortunately lots of countries have WMD (or is that WMD programs?).

The difference, as far as the White House was concerned, was that Hussein was on the brink of using this vast arsenal of deadly weapons, which necessitated a prompt invasion to defend against terrorism. The war, in other words, couldn’t wait. Hussein posed a clear and present danger to his neighbors, the U.S., and the world.

Bush may have lied or exaggerated about the nature of Hussein’s arsenal; that still remains to be seen. But Kristol, surprisingly enough, hits the nail on the head: The question should really be about whether Bush misled the world about immediacy of the threat, which I believe he definitely did.

U.S. forces may still yet find some hidden stockpiles of WMD, though that seems increasingly unlikely, but the discovery, should it ever arrive, won’t (or shouldn’t) put Bush in the clear. The White House promised the world that the threat was imminent. We couldn’t wait for U.N. inspectors to conduct a more thorough investigation. We couldn’t wait for the summer. We couldn’t wait to convince our traditional allies in Europe and North America. We couldn’t even wait to find definitive proof of our claims, because as National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice warned, ”We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

The post-war debate has shifted in an unhelpful way, and I have to admit, I had fallen into the same trap as nearly everyone else. The debate over the last couple of months has been about whether Bush lied about the existence of WMD in Iraq. This is setting Bush up for a victory he doesn’t deserve. Guess what happens if U.S. forces find a beaker with an ounce of botulinum toxin somewhere in Iraq? Bush and his defenders could say, “See, we told you they had WMD!”

Though it pains me to say it, Bill Kristol’s mild criticism of the administration has helped highlight the more important point — we didn’t just base the war on WMD, we based the war on the immediate threat Hussein and the WMD posed. On this, it would appear that we already know that Bush was deceptive in his claims because if Hussein was the imminent threat the administration had made him out to be, we would have found evidence of that threat easily and quickly upon our invasion.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo astutely recognizes the way in which Bush’s defenders are trying to shift the focus of this debate by throwing around words like “conspiracies” and “plots” to discredit political opponents.

“The president’s defenders want to frame the argument like this: the president said there was WMD; his critics said there was WMD,” Marshall wrote. “If he’s wrong, everybody was wrong. If there was a ‘plot’ to deceive the American people…even the president’s critics were in on the plot. So what kind of plot would that be? This is just a head-fake with an advanced degree and it’s deeply dishonest.”

Bingo. This whole strategy of “if Bush was wrong about WMD, he’s in good company” has suddenly become all the rage at the White House. Condoleezza Rice articulated this approach perfectly on Meet the Press on Sunday.

“[T]his didn’t start in September of 2002 with the president’s speech to the United Nations,” Rice said. “This goes back to 1991 where we know that he had weapons of mass destruction, 1994 to 1995 where more came out about his biological weapons program after he finally revealed that when a high-level defector left the country and spooked him into revealing. In 1996, a testimony by then CIA director John Deutch saying, ‘He has weapons of mass destruction.’ In 1998, after weapons inspectors left the country, President Clinton addressing the country from the Oval Office and saying, ‘He has weapons that I am certain he will use. That’s why we’re using military force against Saddam Hussein.’ There’s a bit of revisionist history going on here.”

Sounds persuasive, right? If Bush wasn’t the only one warning of Iraq’s WMD, then he can’t be the only one we blame — or so this argument goes.

But Marshall explains why this is a shell game.

“The public didn’t get sold on this war because Saddam had nerve gas, or botulinum or even anthrax,” Marshall explains. “True or not, a lot of people believed that. The public got sold on the war because the administration argued consistently and vociferously that Saddam was on the brink of amassing far more fearsome weapons — particularly nuclear weapons and that he had growing operational ties to terrorists to whom he might give these weapons or even some of his less threatening chemical agents.

“The only thing that’s pretty clear is that there was no imminent threat,” Marshall added. “And there is a growing body of evidence — much of which was known, frankly, before the war — that the administration did everything it could to push the claim that there was an imminent threat using what was often very, very weak evidence.”