Thursday, February 19, 2004
Thoughts on Iraq
Before we invaded Iraq, I was absolutely convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But that's because the administration said so, and they had access to secret intelligence data that I didn't. So why shouldn't I have believed them.
It seems to me that Saddam Hussein wanted the world to think he had WMD. He thought the United States would be afraid to invade Iraq for fear of all the casualties from his non-existent WMD.
The invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam previously invaded Kuwait, and ever since he has been violating the terms of his conditional surrender. If we want future dictators to take us seriously, we need to show them that we aren't afraid to take military action in such a situation.
It's unfortunate for future foreign policy, as well as Bush's own re-election, that he used WMD as the chief justification for invading Iraq. Anti-war types said "show us the WMD", and now they will feel completely justified in opposing the war.
The danger of WMD in the wrong hands, most especially nuclear weapons, is something that we need to prevent, unless we want to see an act of nuclear terrorism sometime in the future. There is already a huge problem with Pakistan giving away its nuclear secrets to rogue nations like Libya, Iran, and North Korea. If we had been afraid to go into Iraq and take out Saddam, that just would have sent the message to the bad guys that they can pursue their schemes to acquire WMD and the United States won't do anything about it.
As a result of our tough policy in Iraq, Libya's Gadhafi has given up his nuclear weapons program.
