But what if both sides were right? What if the U.N. had worked in part and failed in part? What if war had succeeded and faltered at the same time? Then where would we be?
We’d be living in the real world–which turns out to be the same world as David Kay’s, the man leading the hunt for Saddam’s weapons in Iraq. Most of the headlines about Kay’s interim report picked out one glaring fact: Kay has found no weapons of mass destruction. That is indeed striking, and worrying for anyone who trusted the pre-war intelligence. Yet that finding is itself good reason to believe Kay. He deserves huge credit for his honesty, thoroughness and dedication to the facts.
And the facts according to Kay paint a clear picture of Saddam’s frustrated ambition. Kay found–and nobody seriously disputes–that Saddam wanted any kind of weapon he could lay his hands on or build himself. Before anyone dismisses that as an idle dream, remember this: Saddam was no normal tyrant with a lust for nukes. He drove the world to war in Kuwait and only survived under the constraints of a ceasefire and sanctions. In short, he was a serial offender under a strict parole. And according to Kay, he broke his parole right up to the start of the war. “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities,” said Kay “and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.”
How was Saddam’s ambition frustrated? Look at chemical weapons, one area that prompted widespread concern (including among countries that opposed the war). Kay finds that a mixture of war and the U.N. managed to stop any “large” chemical weapons program. “Information found to date suggests that Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new [chemical weapons] munitions was reduced–if not entirely destroyed–during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and U.N. inspections,” he told Congress last week. In other words: a process of war, sanctions, inspections and war (again) managed to limit the threat of Saddam’s chemical weapons. Limit, but not stop the threat. Among the overlooked items in Kay’s report is the discovery of clandestine work on a stabilizer for VX–one of the deadliest nerve agents on the planet.
What about nukes? Many anti-war critics point to the lack of proof of a nuclear program to show how the war was unjustified and how the U.N. inspectors were succeeding. But that is a strange kind of support for the U.N. process. It’s true that Saddam was several years away from a nuke, according to Kay’s best guess so far. Yet work had begun to re-start his nuclear program under Dr Khalid Ibrahim Said, a senior Baath party official. Said began “several small and relatively unsophisticated research initiatives that could be applied to nuclear weapons development,” Kay discovered. You could say that was just a technical breach of Saddam’s sanctions and the 1991 ceasefire. Only we’re not talking about a driving offense. If you truly support the U.N. process, you have to stand up and defend it. That means stopping a serial offender from breaking his parole.
And just in case you don’t think a few nuclear experiments are too serious, take a look at what Kay says about Saddam’s missiles. Kay’s team found what he called “sufficient evidence to date to conclude that the Iraqi regime was committed to delivery system improvements that would have, if [the war] had not occurred, dramatically breached U.N. restrictions placed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War”. Among that evidence was plans for missiles with a range of at least 1,000 kilometers(about 620 miles)–more than enough to threaten the entire region.
In a briefing with reporters, Kay told how the Iraqis had paid the North Koreans $10 million for delivery of long-range No Dong missiles and upgraded technology. That deal continued when the U.N. inspectors were back in Iraq and Saddam was facing his last, last chance under yet another tough-worded Security Council resolution. The only comforting part of the story is that the North Koreans stiffed the Iraqis, saying they were under too much American scrutiny to deliver.
There are many people inside and outside the Bush administration who believe the case for war in Iraq was over-hyped. Yet what Kay shows, in under-hyped terms, is an overall pattern of threatening and illegal behavior by Saddam Hussein. He also shows that the U.N. inspectors–inspite of their earlier success–were never going to uncover everything.
“We never said inspectors were totally useless,” says a senior administration official. “We just said inspections weren’t achieving the result of full compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions. Inspections can clearly drive [a weapons program] further underground. They can clearly make it more expensive, and have some impact in delaying the program. But in Iraq the commitment was there and the resources were there in terms of the continued research and development.”
Given time, Saddam would surely have built the arsenal he desired for so long. The only reasonable response was what the U.S.-led coalition had been doing since 1991: a mixture of U.N. sanctions, inspections and military force. (And most of us ignored the frequent bombing raids by American and British forces in northern and southern Iraq throughout the 1990s.) We can debate the how and the when. But it was only a matter of time before the balance tipped away from the U.N. and towards the use of force.
Without a decade of sanctions and inspections, Saddam would have fought longer and harder on the battlefield. And without the use of force, Saddam would have built his cherished bomb. Far from showing the futility of the war, David Kay’s report shows just how diplomacy and force can work effectively together.
