July 25, 2003

HINDSIGHT ON IRAQ

Over the past few weeks Washington and the media have been filled with second thoughts about Iraq. When controversy erupts, it often takes a while for the arguments to gel, and now, finally, newspaper columnists David Ignatius and Charles Krauthammer have brought together some points I've had in mind but hadn't put into systematic form.

Many opponents of President Bush have been positively gleeful in their shock and outrage that in his State of the Union Address he made a charge against Saddam Hussein that he could not back up. Specifically, the President said, �The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Critics charge that these infamous 16 words were derived from documents now discredited.

The existence and squirrelly nature of those documents has been widely known for several months. But the British government still believes that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" based on separate evidence.

Niger is a former French colony, and, Ignatius notes, French intelligence there is considered reliable. Britain received post-1999 intelligence, almost certainly from France, indicating that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. The British were able to tell us that they believe the uranium story, but under agreement with France were not allowed to share the supporting documentation.

As former President Clinton told CNN's Larry King, "What happened often happens. There is a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence. The President said it was British intelligence that said it.... British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, 'Well, we probably shouldn't have said that.'"

Certainly, the war was largely based on concerns about possible Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities, and it's embarrassing that we haven't found the weapons we expected to find. We may still, but I think we will at least prove that Saddam was prepared to restart his earlier acknowledged illegal programs as soon as he thought he could get away with it.

I'm never eager to go to war, and I certainly want the justification for war to be supported in the end by the facts. But sometimes it's a judgment call. President Bush considered the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and thought of the 300,000 who could die if Iraq linked up with Al Qaeda. He decided not to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt.

Maybe that linkage between our enemies would have happened, and maybe not. But as we exercise our hindsight, Krauthammer rightly asks us to consider how the world has changed over the past few months:

A brutal regime has been overthrown, and the Iraqis have been given the chance to replace their 30-year nightmare with democracy.

Our presence in Saudi Arabia inflamed Muslims worldwide. With the end of the Iraqi threat, we are now withdrawing.

We have established strong, new alliances with the strategically important Gulf states. Yemen is finally cooperating in the War on Terror, and Jordan is finding it easier to follow pro-American policies.

Most importantly, the new geopolitical realities have given us major opportunities to resolve the Israeli- Palestinian conflict - the dispute which underlies most Islamic anger toward the U.S.