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Katrina and Iraqi WMD: High Stakes, Low Certainty (continued)

One of the mantras of the anti-war position is that "Iraq never threatened us." This oft-repeated claim involves an equivocation between "Iraq never made threats against us" and "Iraq never posed a threat to us." As it happens, it's false however you take it.

In one sense, the testimony I cited in the previous post should be sufficient to convey the nature of the threat. Iraq was a rogue nation twelve years in default of a binding obligation to demonstrate verified disarmament. Its failure to do so put it, for twelve years, in a state of war with the entire coalition that had fought the 1991 Gulf War. Since we were at the head of that coalition, its failure to abide by the terms of UN Resolution 687 was primarily an act of aggression against us.

No amount of arguing about procedure--i.e., whether a second resolution was required to go to war--can change this reality. The failure, and certainly the deliberate failure, of a belligerent party to adhere to the terms of a post-war treaty is ipso facto an act of aggression, even if a second resolution had been required for a military response. Aggression is evidence of a threat if anything is. Add the testimony of Kelly, Ekeus and Butler to that--bearing in mind their stature as experts on Iraqi WMD--and the case for an Iraqi threat is made, QED.

But if that isn't enough, there is plenty more. Let me start with the most trivial and move to the most significant pieces of evidence.

As a relatively trivial point, it's worth noting what is never mentioned: that Iraqi covert agents have at least once previously attempted to engage in terrorism on American soil. This fact is alluded to in Bruce Jentleson's informative book, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990, (citing William M. Carley,"How Iraq Attempted to Kill a Dissident in the United States," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 27, 1991, pp. A1, A4, cited Jentleson, p. 276n.23). Once bitten, twice shy, you'd think: if they could try it once, couldn't they try something bigger later on?

Second, it's often forgotten that Saddam explicitly threatened terrorism against the United States in his famous 1990 exchange with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie, on the eve of the first Gulf War:

If you use pressure, we will deploy pressure and force. We know that you can harm us although we do not threaten you. But we too can harm you. Everyone can cause pain according to their ability and size. We cannot come all the way to you in the United States but individual Arabs may reach you.

Unsurprisingly, neither Ambassador Glaspie nor the first Bush Administration made any significant attempt to respond verbally to this remarkable threat. But considering that the U.S. kept the "pressure" on Iraq throughout the 1990s--with sanctions, inspections, bombings, and assassination/coup attempts-- there is ample reason to think Saddam would have wanted to follow through on it.

And of course, he did. How many times have I heard the idiocy that "Iraq never attacked us"? Well, it fired on U.S. aircraft in the no-fly zones frequently enough for ten years. Hostile anti-aircraft fire would seem to count as an "attack." So would the attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993. So does the attempted bombing of a U.S. government facility in Prague in 1998. And the as- yet unrebutted presence of Iraqi EMPTA at the Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory in Khartoum adds to the list of threat-bolstering items (the evidence is presented in this book). These threats were no less threats for being failures on the part of the Iraqi secret service.

But Exhibit A in the list of "threat-bolstering items" must surely be Iraq's dealings with North Korea between 2001 and 2003, as detailed in yet another one of those little-discussed news items-- this one in The New York Times:

For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Mr Hussein's sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea, according to computer files discovered by international inspectors and the accounts of Bush administration officials.

The officials now say they believe that those negotiations--mostly conducted in neighboring Syria, apparently with the knowledge of the Syrian government--were not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles.

Instead, the goal was to obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system, which would be capable of hitting American allies and bases around the region, according to Bush Administration officials. (David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, "For the Iraqis, a Missile Deal That Went Sour," New York Times, Dec. 1, 2003.)

If you're insentient, of course, a full production line of illegal missiles won't strike you at all as in the nature of a "threat." After all, it wasn't accompanied by a signed declaration by Saddam Hussein, formalizing an intent to use North Korean missiles to hit the Costco or Fresh Foods in your hometown. Still, there is something at least problematic about the fact that but for the war, we would never have known about, much less stopped the deal:

The first clue of the North Korea-Iraq deal surfaced in public in October when Dr. Kay released preliminary findings of his inquiry into Mr. Hussein's program for developing unconventional weapons.

Dr. Kay said his team had uncovered evidence that Iraq had negotiated a deal with North Korea to acquire missiles, a transaction that senior administration officials said was apparently never detected by American intelligence agencies.

But when it came time for the North Koreans to deliver on the deal, they demurred....According to the files, the North Koreans said Iraq was under too much American scrutiny.

Does any of this indicate an "imminent" threat? No. But it indicates clear evidence of a threat. If inspections were working so well, why wasn't this deal uncovered before the war?

More generally, why wasn't evidence of the preceding sort taken seriously as indicating a threat?

For two reasons. First, if you are committed a priori to the thesis that no threat exists, or that a threat must be imminent to be taken seriously--or if you're committed to inaction on ideological grounds--you can explain evidence of virtually any threat away. Indeed, you can explain the threat away even after it manifests itself. After all, some people protested the idea of military action after 9/11. It's not clear what would count for such people as evidence of an action-requiring threat.

Second, it's easy to drown evidence of a threat in well-poisoning rhetoric that suggests that anyone drawing attention to the threat is an alarmist or has bad motives. That is what was done, and is still done, when it comes to the Iraqi WMD threat.

And that is what the Iraqi WMD issue shares in common with Hurricane Katrina. Why wasn't evidence of the destruction of New Orleans by flooding taken seriously? Well...try this explanation on for size, from the October 2001 issue of Scientific American:

Since the late 1980s Louisiana's senators have made various pleas to Congress to fund massive remedial work. But they were not backed by a unified voice. L.S.U. had its surge models, and the Corps had others. Despite agreement on general solutions, competition abounded as to whose specific projects would be most effective. The Corps sometimes painted academics' cries about disaster as veiled pitches for research money. Academia occasionally retorted that the Corps's solution to everything was to bulldoze more dirt and pour more concrete, without scientific rationale. Meanwhile oystermen and shrimpers complained that the proposals from both the scientists and the engineers would ruin their fishing grounds.

"Not backed by a unified voice": I can't think of a better phrase to describe the Bush Administration's attempted justification of the Iraq war. "General agreement as to goals followed by total confusion about how to implement them": I can't think of a better description of the Bush Administration's method of waging the war, either. As for "cries of disaster" being construed as "veiled pitches" for something else, well...it's worth asking why "No Blood for Oil" is taken seriously as an argument against enforcing UN Resolution 1441.

Anti-warriors now triumphantly declare that the absence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq retroactively nullifies the evidence we had before the war that Iraq posed a threat to us. If you believe that, ask yourself whether you believe there would have been a threat to New Orleans from a Category 4+ hurricane if Hurricane Katrina had not happened. Is the existence of a threat validated merely by virtue of the fact that the threatening event ended up happening? Would there not have been evidence of a threat had Katrina not blown through?

The answer is "no," both with respect to Iraq and Katrina: the non-occurrence of a threatening event doesn't nullify good evidence indicating the possibility of the event's occurring, and when in the nature of the case action has to be taken before the event comes to pass (it's too late when it's "imminent"), it's rational to take good evidence of a threat as indicating the existence of one (a fact codified in the criminal law in the concept of "probable cause"). In a case where the threat is serious and one has the right to take action, action is justified.

There was good evidence that Iraq was a WMD threat. There was good evidence that New Orleans faced a hurricane-flooding threat. The non-existence of WMD stockpiles didn't nullify the former; the non-occurrence of Hurricane Katrina would not have nullified the latter. Our government had the right--and the obligation--to take threat-averting action in both cases. It did in one case, and the threat was smaller than anticipated. It didn't in the other case, and the threat was larger than anticipated. But evidence of both threats was there for the asking and the failure to respond would have been (in the Iraqi case) and was (in the case of Katrina) a dereliction of duty.

That, and not the red herring of "the National Guard's being in Iraq but not Louisiana" is the real connection between Iraq and Katrina.

Posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 at 7:58 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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