Pushing Back - But Against Whom?

Three weeks ago I quoted from a Wall Street Journal piece that criticized the "push-back" effort of the Bush White House for pre-emptively conceding the WMD argument in favor of pointing out that the Democrats, at the time of the October 2002 war resolution and for several years previous, all said the same things about the Saddam threat that he did:

The Administration, inadvertently, may be contributing to the problem [of falling public support for the war]. In its push-back week, the President and others have cited prewar Democratic statements of belief that Saddam in fact had WMD, leaving listeners to conclude that Saddam duped everyone. This too undermines belief at the margin that any of that WMD stuff is very real, or a direct threat.

Here is one man's view of why we are in Iraq: We are trying to democratize this country so they don't try to kill us. That Iraqis should "get their freedom" is genuinely good and desirable. But I wish President Bush would say more often that Iraqi democratization is in our raw self-interest. It doesn't much matter to me whether the country we democratize is Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria. The theory that democracies don't attack other democracies is as strong as such notions get, and what the world most needs now is a new, large Islamic democracy. A democracy, however "imperfect," is less likely than an authoritarian state to detonate a nuclear device in someone else's territory.

I thought of this yesterday when I came across this article in the New York Sun:

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.

The assertion comes as President Bush said yesterday that much of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was incorrect.

The conventional wisdom, of course, is that Saddam Hussein did not possess WMD and never, ever did, and thus the entirety of Operation Iraqi Freedom was and is a murderous fraud and we should withdraw from Iraq immediately and put Saddam back on his throne and profusely apologize for all his trouble. And, of course, the conventional wisdom, as usual, is crap.

That Saddam evacuated his WMD stockpiles to Syria is the most underreported story of the GWOT because, well, there's that darned conventional wisdom that calcified into absolutist dogma long ago. And yet the seedlings of this truth keep poking up through the cement here and there, with inexorablness that will not be denied:

The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. "He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria," General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. "No one went to Syria to find it."

From July 2002 to June 2005, when he retired, General Yaalon was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, the top job in the Israeli military, analogous to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the American military. He is now a military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He made similar, but more speculative, remarks in April 2004 that attracted little notice in America; at that time he was quoted as saying of the Iraqi weapons, "Perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria."

The Israeli general's remarks came on the eve of Mr. Bush's speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, in which the president addressed the issue of intelligence and defended the decision to go to war. "When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. This judgment was shared by the intelligence agencies of governments who did not support my decision to remove Saddam. And it is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," Mr. Bush said in remarks that were one of a series of speeches he has given recently on the war.

So here we have the President running away from his primary justification for invading Iraq, which General Yaalon essentially corroborates, but in such a way as to point out two critical mistakes the White House made in the prosecution of the GWOT: going back to the UN to try and get "international" approval for taking out Saddam that it was never going to get, thus providing him with the time he needed to ship his WMD out of the country; and limiting military action to Iraq instead of pursuing those weapons right across the border into Syria and bagging two Ba'athist dictators for the price of one. Indeed, the first error made the second one more or less inevitable; seeking a UN fig leaf narrowed the focus, of necessity, to just Iraq, and that did Saddam a huge favor of providing him with the perfect repository for his WMD where he knew that the Coalition was never going to go.

Ironically, if Bush had been the "cowboy" of his detractors' derisive depiction, he'd have simply invaded, at least six months earlier, and bagged Saddam and his entire arsenal. And three years of DisLoyal Opposition talking points would have never been, and the President himself would not be making mea culpas that he does not need to and should not be making in any case.

The ultimate irony is that we're still going to have to invade Syria, as well as Iran, if the GWOT is to be won. Only now that task will be infinitely more difficult to sell, and will probably have to await another 9/11-magnitude (or worse) disaster.

Osama bin Laden was right back in 1993 (after the Blackhawk down debacle) about America being a "paper tiger." His mistake was in assuming that all POTUS' would be as weak and cowardly as Bill Clinton.

But most of them are, in one way or another. Ditto even a Republican-controlled Congress. And even Dubya is pushing against his earlier self as much as he is the domestic opposition.

It's too late for Saddam Hussein and his delusions of grandeur, but it would seem that all bin Laden - and/or his al Qaeda "brand" - and Bashar Assad and the Iranian mullahgarchy and Kim jong-Il and Hugo Chavez, etc., etc., etc. - have to do now is run out the clock, and the mayhem can resume.

And to whom will we turn in that next moment of national crisis?

Hillary Clinton.

I'm shivering already - and not because it's 21 degrees outside.