Going to War in Iraq
By Alexander Marriott 17 May 2004

Chemical weapons are now being used in rigged explosives in Iraq, and oddly, people are now jumping for joy that the weapons of mass destruction existed. Somehow, this justifies the war’s occurrence. Why are people still looking for justification?

The fact that Saddam Hussein helped Abu Al-Zarqawi after his leg was blown off in Afghanistan doesn’t constitute cause for war? Does it matter that he is now rising through the ranks of Al Qaeda through his “insurgency” in Iraq and through personally committing barbaric acts like the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg?

The fact that Saddam had Chinese engineers and technicians running all over the country to network his air defenses so that one day his missile firings at U.S. and British jets would score a hit didn’t constitute a legitimate reason to use force?

Because of the Bush administration’s irrational desire to get the United Nations to approve our actions we appealed to the only concern the United Nations had in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction. All the intelligence agencies of the western world agreed that Saddam had WMDs, but they western countries didn’t agree on the appropriate action to take given that fact (even though such a state of affairs represented a clear violation of the Gulf War ceasefire agreement, as did the missile firings at our jets).

Our position was that we had to invade to prevent terrorists from using chemical weapons against us, not unlike they are trying to do in Iraq right now. Our “allies” like France and Germany, who had been bribed into submission preferred to continue the graft of United Nations inspections, which led to such great achievements like the prevention of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula and the quashing of Iranian nuclear ambitions. The fact is, the only successful nuclear disarmament occurred because the country disarming (South Africa) sincerely and wholeheartedly wanted to get rid of its nuclear weapons. Unless we put the IAEA in charge of North Korea and Iran we can have nothing approaching certainty about what the hell is happening without spies. Of course that would mean going to war and then the IAEA would be entirely redundant.

Instead of being glad that weapons were found we should be apprehensive that we weren’t the ones to find them. We should be apprehensive that the terrorists have been able to murder the president of the Iraqi Governing Council without getting caught. We should be apprehensive that Iran is clearly attempting to ruin American efforts and is, in all likelihood, helping Osama bin Laden elude capture. And even if they are not, Iran is, and has been, the foremost sponsor of terrorism since the Islamic revolution there in 1979. Our days of delay in dealing with these problems are not buying us any security.