Why liberals opposed the war - a reminder

James Lillets writes about the chasm separating the pro- and anti-war camps:

Simple: we live in an era of non-contiguous information streams. I believe one thing; someone else believes another – and the bedrock assumptions are utterly contradictory. This is what drives me nuts about discussing current events with some people. It’s like discussing the Apollo program with people who think it was all faked, or discussing archeology with those who believe the world is six thousand years old. I think the Iraq Campaign was part of a broad war against Islamicist fascism and the states that enable it; others think it’s all about oil and Halliburton jerking the strings of a Jeebus puppet. No. Middle. Ground.

This Iraqi WMD debate is a perfect example. What had been a consensus has fractured into two irreconcilable camps, one being “he had them” and the other being “Bush LIED!” I go back a long way on this issue. I remember. I was in DC during the first Gulf War. Everyone thought Iraq had bugs and gas. Later we all read the accounts of the Kurdish atrocities. Paul Wellstone signed on to the 1998 attack on Iraq for reasons that could have come from the lips of Bush himself.

Nine months later, we haven’t found them. Haven’t found Hitler’s charred femur, either.

This doesn’t gibe with what I remember. I remember claims that Iraq had nuclear weapons - but then the inspectors reported that there was no sign of any nuclear weapons, or even a particularly-advanced nuclear weapons program. I remember the Bush and Blair administrations warning us about chemical and biological weapons - and the inspectors reporting that they’d destroyed a great number of illegal missiles (illegal because they went something like 170km instead of 150km, which on the face of it is a footling discrepancy). I remember the inspectors reporting that they were having a great deal of success, and that they wanted more time to complete their job.

Look, most people in the Labour and Liberal parties, and their counterparts in other countries, could agree on resolution 1441. This was after September 11th and the war in Afghanistan, and there was pressure on Saddam Hussein, who we had gone to war with before and attempted to contain ever since, to open up his books, for us to verify intelligence claims that he was building up stocks of WMDs and, perhaps terrorism. And we did this, and the inspections were going OK, the guy was contained, he was no imminent threat to anyone that we could see - and then the US decided that that wasn’t good enough, and went to war when they didn’t have to. Pulling troops and intelligence analysts out of Afghanistan, which, in terms of the war on terror was very probably a step backwards, didn’t make sense to me at the time, and still doesn’t.

The war on Iraq was declared on the basis that he had WMD and could use them at any time, which was looking increasingly unlikely at the time as a direct result of diplomatic activity in the area, backed up by threat of military force. Now people are saying “Saddam Hussein was a bad man, and we were right to overthrow him”, but that doesn’t wash. First of all, declaring war is a supremely serious decision, and you can’t switch rationales part-way through when the first one turns out to have failed. That’s like saying the guy over there is going to shoot you, then finding out that the guy’s gun was a toy gun, but that’s OK because it turns out he beat his wife.

Secondly, if you take that logic, then to be consistent a) you should be looking at a hell of a lot of other evil regimes in the world, and b) you should certainly have looked at North Korea before anywhere else. (As a reminder, North Korea almost certainly does have nukes, and an active interest in weapons proliferation.)

That is why I, and others, opposed the war at the time, and why I still do.