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Seriously, Now
 
Michael Ubaldi, June 9, 2003.
 

Stanley Kurtz returns sanity to the weapons debate:

Prior to the war, it was impossible to tell how close Saddam was to building a nuclear bomb. We hoped and believed that he was still at least a year or two away from success, although the possibility that he might be even closer than that had to be reckoned with. After all, our intelligence had once before proven wrong. We had underestimated the progress of Saddam's nuclear program, as we eventually learned from defectors. But even if Saddam was a couple of years away from a bomb, the need to invade was urgent. The point was precisely to stop Saddam before he got close enough to a bomb to exploit our uncertainty about his capacity and blackmail us. That, after all, is exactly what the North Koreans have been doing for some time.

All of this was publicly discussed before the war. Opponents of invasion emphasized that Saddam was probably at least a couple of years away from building a bomb. And they argued that conventional deterrence could in any case keep a nuclear-armed Saddam under control. Proponents of the war argued that Saddam might be closer to a bomb than we realized, and that, in any case, it was necessary to strike him quickly, when he was (we hoped) too far from a bomb to blackmail us.


And now opponents of the invasion, left with little on which to stand, are trying to turn the argument into a question of Saddam even possessing those catastrophic weapons. Aside from the logical impossibility of those claims, this cynical, destructive strategy is, as I've said, not about Iraq or humanity: it's about the Left and its petty little theories.