Why did the U.S. invade Iraq?

Many attempts were made in the months leading up to the invasion to prove that Iraq was associated with al Qaeda. They all failed. Documents were obtained and presented without proper vetting, and later proved to be forgeries. Claims by Iraqi expatriates could not be verified, and were denied by other such exiles as the product of malicious mendacity.

The tongue of malice is wet with falsehood; the mouth of malice spits lies.

Very shortly after the occupation of Baghdad began, reporters from the U.K.'s Sunday Telegraph claimed to have found in one of the abandoned ministries a letter signed by Saddam Hussein regarding a purported meeting, in which the name "Osama bin Laden" had been rather clumsily concealed under a layer of White-Out. The paper turned out an editorial touting the letter as proof of connivance between Iraq and al Qaeda. Then, amid general interpretations of the letter as a probable fake, the Telegraph simply dropped the story — presumably the victim of a sudden attack of ethics not quite virulent enough to compel the paper to admit any error.

So there was once again no evidence, no documentation to associate Iraq with al Qaeda. And indeed, why should there be?

A buffer against fundamentalism

Saddam Hussein's Iraq, for all its faults, was still the secular buffer state we envisioned as a bulwark against rampant Islamic fundamentalism in the geostrategic planning that led to U.S. support for Hussein throughout the 1980s. Al Qaeda, on the other hand, was exactly the sort of fundamentalist organization that most despised Hussein and his ilk as infidels and Western dupes. Hussein and bin Laden had nothing good to say of each other, and indeed two senior al Qaeda officials held by the U.S. have said bin Laden categorically rejected any collaboration with Hussein.

There was indeed a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. It belonged to a bin Ladenesque fundamentalist who viewed Hussein's regime as a decadent and irreligious abomination that he was sworn to overthrow. Only its location in a no-fly zone prevented its destruction — by Hussein's forces.

It is axiomatic in today's world that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." But no matter where you stand on the ongoing confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian people, it is quite clear that monetary support for the suicide bombers emerging from the latter, however morally questionable, did not threaten the United States or its vital interests in any significant way if at all. Certainly, it created no threat sufficient to justify overthrowing Iraq's government.

Those invisible WMDs

• Most of us can accept that there was no apparent connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. But according to U.S. and British intelligence, Iraq did have massive quantities of WMDs, including biological, chemical and possibly even nuclear arms, any of which could easily have made its way into the hands of terrorists.

What WMDs? The Iraqi government, motivated by the very best of causes — self-preservation — destroyed any illicit weapons it may have had before the U.N. inspectors arrived. That is by far the simplest explanation for the lack of any clear violations in Hans Blix' report, not to mention the embarrassing failure of any such weapons to appear now that U.S.-led forces control Iraq.

While Iraq is a largish country — about the size of California — it is not boundless. Using the "best available" U.S. and British intelligence reports, U.N. inspectors were unable to find any prohibited weapons, although they did note that Iraq had "failed to account for" all the weapons reported destroyed. Dismissing the search as incompetent, the U.S. attacked anyway, saying it knew the weapons were there and would find them after the war.

So, where are they?

This was a real gas

After many months of fruitless searching, U.S.-led forces have been unable to find a single WMD — although they made much of having found the "means of production": two trucks purportedly outfitted as mobile chemical/biological laboratories, which later turned out to be hydrogen-generating stations for artillery balloons. In fact, the main search parties have gone home and their leader, David Kay, has quit, convinced there is nothing further to find. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has even dipped his toe in the waters of world opinion, suggesting that perhaps it doesn't really matter whether or not the WMDs existed. The toe, however, dropped off with frostbite: It seems it does matter if the U.S. government turns out to have been lying in its pitch for this war. Indeed, there is a Senate inquiry under debate now which may or may not yield any particular results, but which suggests the potential seriousness of the political fallout. And that is why the U.S. and British governments have now gone back to asserting that the weapons are present and will be found in time.

A cache in Syria?

What are we looking for then: pea-shooters?

The intelligence reports U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell alluded to in making his case to the U.N. Security Council claimed that Iraq had massive quantities of chemical and biological arms at the ready, that it could use said weapons within minutes on any nearby target, that it had Scud missiles as long-distance delivery for such substances, that it had drones capable of spraying chemical or biological agents over wide areas, that it was near to completing nuclear weapons, and a host of other such assertions. Yet nothing has been found. Nothing was used against U.S.-led forces at any time — even when self-preservation would appear to dictate that they must be used at once or never. There has been no indication of any relevant contact between Baghdad and Damascus or any other neighboring state prior to or during the war that would suggest that WMDs have been smuggled elsewhere.

Meanwhile, both U.S. and British intelligence agencies have come under fire for having arguably distorted their reports to satisfy political imperatives from the White House and Number 10 Downing Street, while some agents have themselves come forward to complain of exactly such pressure from above. In an especially telling instance, crucial "intelligence" used in administration pitches to the American people and the United Nations later turned out to have been plagiarized from a student thesis.

If indeed Iraq had powerful WMDs to use, and could in fact deploy them in combat within minutes, why should the Iraqi government have refrained from using them? No one has ever accused this regime of excessive concern for human suffering, and since it was going down anyway, one would confidently expect it to hit the invaders with everything it had. Yet we are told today that Iraq may have unaccountably spent the last days before the war burying its most effective weapons. What we are not told is for what conceivable purpose.

A nuclear smoking gun?

Khidhir Hamza was a former nuclear scientist in Iraq, but headed the nuclear development program only for "a brief period in 1987." He also has been characterized as a sensationalistic opportunist who has latched onto Paul Wolfowitz and other Defense Department hawks to promote both the Iraqi opposition and his own personal fortune. Hamza left Iraq in 1994, when Iraq was much less hobbled than it was just prior to the 2003 invasion by years of sanctions, and not even then was the nation close to acquiring nuclear weapons capability. The regime's uranium stockpiles were both qualitatively and quantitatively insufficient for bomb-making purposes, and other materials necessary for weaponization were also lacking and unavailable. Almost all reliable reports showed Iraq with zero nuclear capability for many years to come.

A menacing paradox

In fact, the only weapons that can be constructed from the kind of uranium in Iraq's nuclear stockpiles are so-called "dirty bombs" — portable weapons designed to release nuclear contamination. These are not used by states for warfare because their impact is too limited and unpredictable, but are a truly dreadful prospect in the hands of terrorists such as al Qaeda, which has unsuccessfully sought fissile materials for years. Until the invasion, however, this uranium was securely stored in the nation's nuclear facilities, well out of reach of al Qaeda and its ilk.

Today's paramount paradox is that the invasion — purportedly undertaken to make the world safer by taking deadly weapons out of the hands of Hussein — created opportunities for looting while U.S. forces were busy securing the Oil Ministry. And among the looted sites were Iraq's former nuclear facilities. If we are very lucky, none of those materials found its way to terrorist groups, but it would be unwise to assume as much.

The human side: removing a vicious despot

• Peace protesters and other opponents of the invasion continue to ignore the fact that Saddam Hussein killed far more of his people than the United States and its allies, which made a laudable practice of minimizing civilian casualties.

The U.S. and its Oilition of the Bribed and Browbeaten did reduce "collateral damage" in this war, as distinguished from the 1991 Gulf War, although largely as a matter of public relations. Fewer civilians did perish this time. But there were still ten to twelve thousand killed by direct military action alone in a conflict that is not yet over — and this takes no account of the hundreds of thousands who have died because of 12 years of sanctions and the destruction of clean water sources, hospitals and other vital infrastructure during the invasion.

The slaughter of the patriots

A disturbing assumption underlies the ongoing discussion of casualties: It is taken for granted that although civilians may be and generally are innocent bystanders and not legitimate targets, soldiers are combatants who should be killed as fast and efficiently as possible. But the sad truth is that most soldiers are uneducated young men and women who are filled with patriotism and propaganda by governments that use them as cannon-fodder. Even so, U.S.-led forces turned the full force of their military machine on the ill-equipped and poorly led foot-soldiers of the Iraqi army, whose only crime was to have fought to defend their country. Tens of thousands of them have been killed — not uncommonly with the white flags of surrender in their hands — producing little or no outcry on their behalf. And yet ultimately, are they any less innocent than any civilians — who may also be moved to take up arms against the invader?

(Update: This has obviously come to pass, and has produced far more casualties than resulted from combat with Iraq's former army.)

"Pawns in the game are not victims of chance."

— Sting
from "Children's Crusade" on the album
"The Dream of the Blue Turtles"

• From a humanitarian standpoint, it does not matter whether Iraq had terrorist affiliations or WMDs. Saddam Hussein was a monster who violently suppressed his own people and used chemical weapons against both Kurds and Shia Iraqis. His death or departure makes the Middle East and the world as a whole a better place.

True. Saddam Hussein was filth. But it's strange to hear those arguments being advanced by Donald Rumsfeld, who in 1986 represented the Reagan administration in selling Hussein weapons for use against Iran, apparently unconcerned by contemporary reports that those weapons were also being used against Iraqis. Indeed, apologists for the rightist cabal in power then and now insist that "Realpolitik" dictated the move — that the U.S. had to arm Iraq to stop Iranian expansionism. It seems Rumsfeld et al. are humanitarians when it suits them.

A monster of our own creation

Speaking as one who opposed assisting Hussein in the first place, I would have been glad to see him removed from power — if it were that simple. But Realpolitik is still alive: We aid plenty of other dictators as vile as Hussein, and for similar reasons (a case in point: president Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who has a charming habit of having his political opponents boiled alive). A good bit of American foreign policy has always come down to "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," and such a policy can produce some awfully strange bedfellows.

The fundamental question then becomes: Assuming the U.S. has a legitimate role to play in enforcing international human-rights law, and we begin deposing the worst despots, where do we stop? Who decides which ruler is a despot who has to go, and which is a useful ally who just needs guidance? These are the issues that make the United Nations indispensable, for its broader consensus can establish guidelines for intervention that cannot reasonably be dismissed as parochial, biased and potentially tainted by corruption. And that is why international law exists ... else rogue states will begin to go around invading other nations on pretexts of their own devising.

• You admit Saddam Hussein was a monster. You say you care about the Iraqi people, whom Hussein routinely disappeared, tortured and executed. But if you don't actively oppose a dictator like this, you tacitly support him. How then can you oppose America's noble intervention to remove him, no matter the reasons we were told it was being undertaken?

The invasion flouted international law and rendered the United Nations, the only body formally empowered to undertake such an action, essentially as irrelevant as the American right has portrayed it as being. Since it is generally agreed that invading a country solely to remove an odious head of state is roughly comparable to stopping a schoolyard bully by sweeping the play area with a machine gun, any such removal must be considered and agreed upon as necessary by the international community. For a single nation to undertake such an action represents a disregard for international law that has already earned us rebukes from our closest allies, and suggests imperial aspirations to many informed observers.

At random from the truth

The argument that "if you aren't against him, you're with him" is no more valid than its counterpart, "if you aren't with us, you're against us." Many invasion critics were outspoken in their opposition to Hussein, but would stop short of overrunning Iraq, killing tens of thousands, to stop a dictator no worse than a dozen others whom the U.S. coddles to this day.

And as for the nobility of the attack: Let's review. The Bush administration, in its unshakable determination to go to war, first lied that Iraq had sponsored the September 11 attacks, then lied that Iraq was close to building nuclear weapons, then lied that Iraq still had WMDs. If its motives were truly noble, it should have tried selling the war on its humanitarian benefits, as it has now tried to do after the fact.

Motive and opportunity: the new Great Game

• Then why did we invade? And don't say it was all done for the oil.

My reply is now being drafted. Please return soon. And thanks for your patience.

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