Just War in Iraq II: WMD

(Continued from Just War in Iraq I).

Ending the illegal proliferation of WMD by war criminals is a just cause. The question is, can it count as a just cause for Gulf War II if there wasn’t any actual proliferation going on? Is it just for me to shove you away if I believed you were about to punch me, but really you were just stretching?

Two things come to bear on this question. First, the character of the regime in question. How reasonable was it for us to interpret that particular stretch of Saddam’s arm as a preparation for a right hook? Very. Given a military coup that took him to power, an eight year war with Iran, the chemical butchery at Halabjah in 1988, two decades of torture and murderous purges against his own people, forced relocations of whole populations, the invasion of Kuwait, the lunatic refusal to back down in the face of the whole world, and a decade of cat-and-mouse dissimulation with the UN, the whole world was justified in believing the worst about Saddam’s intentions and ambitions.

Second, we must judge as if we were the policymakers making the decision with the information at hand then, not as omniscient historians blessed with what we (claim to) know now. Any fool can prescribe a better course after it’s all over, and if you preach that moral judgment can only be made reliably with full information, it degenerates to the useless and rarified musings of well-informed sophisticates while the man in the trenches loses his moorings. Actual decision makers will come to doubt the value of moral reasoning at all, becoming either an indecisive Hamlet (the United Nations) or a reasonless power maximizer (Jacques Chirac), if always damned for a hard decision a decade later by an armchair author. No, moral reasoning, even if done on incomplete or unsteady information, has to be allowable.

And every bit of information President Bush has said Saddam was trying to build the Bomb. Every western intelligence agency, every report by UN inspectors, every analyst and observer assessed that Saddam was hiding something, and inferred that it must have been WMD programs. If Cheney hyped the intel or unjustifiably uttered the appellation “imminent”, it does not change the underlying information or the justice of Bush’s belief about the character of Saddam.

If, as most seem convinced, we never find a single chemical or biological weapon in Iraq, it will still have been a just war. But it may not be such a complicated issue. It is good to bear in mind DCI George Tenet’s words of last fall: “When the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), led by David Kay, issued its interim report in October, acknowledging that it had not found chemical or biological weapons, the inspectors had then visited only ten of the 130 major ammunition depots in Iraq; these ammunition dumps are huge, sometimes five miles by five miles on a side. Two depots alone are roughly the size of Manhattan.”

The hunt for WMD will go on for quite some time, and may yet conclude by establishing the justice of the war by the highest possible standard of the strongest skeptic. How sad that we would have need to rejoice at that.