Courtesy of David Horowitz at FrontPageMag:
...The other day Senator Barbara Boxer referred to WMDs as the only reason the Congress voted to authorize the use of force. Most liberals are not this brazenly ignorant. But the fact is that most liberal critiques of the war emphasize WMDS and completely ignore the dilemma that confronted George Bush on December 8th 2002, a dilemma whose resolution was the actual cause of this war.
December 8th, 2002 was the day Security Council Resoluton 1441 set for Saddam to comply with what was the last of 17 UN resolutions designed to hold him to the terms of the truce in the Gulf War of 1991. These terms were set in two UN resolutions (687 and 689). On December 8th Saddam defied this resolution as well. I have never seen an argument by war critics that claims that Saddam actually complied with this UN ultimatum. The ultimatum said comply "or serious consequences will follow" -- a diplomatic euphemism for war. I have read Hans Blix's book Disarming Iraq and he clearly says Saddam did not comply. He also says in the same book that the utlimatum meant war if Saddam failed to comply. Blix is himself an appeaser and -- to be fair -- also states in the book that he didn't think war would be justified even though Saddam had failed to comply.
So any critique of Bush's war policy that is not simply an argument for appeasing Saddam has to begin by making the case that it would have been okay to let Saddam violate the 17th UN resolution, and also to leave Saddam in power. In fact, John Kerry has made a stab at this position suggesting that we could have contained Saddam. I'd like to see the actual defense of this position. The cost of containing Saddam was one billion dollars a week, 100,000 troops maintained the desert, and the main focus of U.S. foreign policy permanently fixed in minding this one rogue state. Moreover, it would have meant that US/UN ultimatums were in effect meaningless. How would that impact the prospects of peace? As Tony Blair put it to the French at the time, not enforrcing UN resolution 1441 would have meant fundamentally undermining international law.
My guess is that it provides no consolation to those opposed to over-throwing Saddam Hussein that in the end it was a high-stakes poker game where Hussein bargained, incorrectly, that the whole thing was one big bluff. I wonder how Iran and North Korean judge the will of the Americans now. I know how Libya judged it. And I know how Osama bin Laden judge the lack of US response to his terrorist activities before 9/11.
Update: This post has generated quite a bit of traffic on my site. Could someone please let me know who linked to it?
