The WMD Guinness Book Red Herring

Even in a time of an unceasing barrage of demagogic drivel from the Bush-haters, the manufactured flap over the “missing WMD” has got to set some kind of world record for red herring chutzpah.

As any long-time reader of mine knows, I have no great regard for the competence of the CIA. Its seedy alliance with the squishes at State to oppose Ahmad Chalabi has created a political morass in Iraq (see Childishness in Iraq, TTP August 7, 2003), and its unwillingness to help the democratic opposition overthrow the Mullacracy in Iran is disgraceful. It perversely backed Islamofascist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Pakistan ISI intelligence agency continues to play the CIA like a fiddle (see Afghan Poppies, TTP, October 2, 2003). Bush never should have retained Clinton holdover George Tenet as DCI, and should have replaced him long ago with someone like Jim Woolsey.

Yet with all that said, the WMD debacle cannot be laid at the CIA’s feet. For here’s the key question: What other intelligence agency in the world claimed Saddam didn’t have any WMD? You cannot accuse the CIA of a singular failure here when all of the world’s intel outfits from the Israelis to the Russians to the French agreed.

What we have is something far weirder than a CIA intelligence failure — it is a world intelligence failure. This is scary. How is it possible for every intel professional on the planet to be wrong about this?

So — this leaves us with two alternatives. Which sounds more reasonable — that either every single intelligence agency in every country in the whole world is run by stupid incompetents, or… Saddam really did posses WMD and WMD programs?

Maybe the failure to find them so far proves the former alternative and disproves the latter. Maybe. But the life-or-death bottom line is that it doesn’t matter. When you have unanimous consent from every possible source without exception that someone is a clear and present danger to your life and limb, you have a moral obligation to take him out.

We should have done this with North Korea a long time ago. We Neville Chamberlained with Pyongyang instead and now it’s too late, the nuclear toothpaste is out of the North Korean tube. We should have let India destroy Pakistan’s nuclear facilities when they were just being built, like Israel destroyed Saddam’s Osirak reactor in 1981. Now it’s too late and Pakistan is the Nuclear Bazaar for rogue states. It may not be too late to rid Iran of nukes via a democratic revolution, but we’re running out of time.

The one single place where we did act in time was Iraq. The operative words in that last sentence are in time. A dictatorial regime such as Saddam’s has no claim on sovereignty. A monster such as Saddam has no rights. Any country has the moral authority to remove such a regime with military force, or put a bullet in such a dictator’s brain.

The US, or Botswana for that matter, would have the same right to end the rule and life of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or that of Fidel Castro, or of the generals who run Burma. The morality of such action is not the issue — that’s settled. The real question is: Does the national security interests of our country require such action? Given the total world agreement regarding Saddam’s WMD, George Bush had no choice but to answer yes.

That he did answer yes and did take action in time before it was too late is cause to hail him as the hero of our times. Instead the Demagogues — oh, pardon me, the Democrats — condemn him for it. It is this Orwellian perversion of values that characterizes them now. I suppose that’s because such perversion is all they have left to say. They have nothing to offer except red herrings.