In Defense of President Bush's Decision to Invade Iraq

Much ink has been spilt on the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Most of that ink has been spilt in order to critique Bush's decision to invade Iraq, given the difficulty of sustaining the long war as well as that of helping to ensure stability and peace there.

Jeff McIntyre writes this article to defend Bush's actions in taking the United States to war in 2003. He summarizes and discusses the content of the available intelligence on WMD in Iraq in the lead-up to war. This intelligence had been collected by a number of different agencies from various countries, and it was available to leaders representing all political points of view. In addition, McIntyre summarizes the case against Iraq's trustworthiness and brutality during the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrating that Iraq was anything but a nation led by a rational and moral leader at peace with his neighbors.

The crux of McIntyre's argument is that while WMDs were never found to the extent that we believed existed there prior to the invasion, Iraq retained the ability and wherewithal to reactivate its weapons programs at any time. For McIntyre, the existence or non-existence of WMDs was not as important as the existence of the weapons programs, which was evidently in place at the time of our invasion. This fact, according to McIntyre, supports the decision to go to war against Iraq to disarm it.

Here is more from McIntyre's piece:

As mentioned earlier, all six of the world’s major external intelligence agencies, as well as prominent politicians and senior officials in the U.S. Democrat and Republican parties, were persuaded, by their respective pieces of intelligence evidence, that Saddam had WMDs. This is quite a different kettle of fish from the mantra of the anti-war Left that “Bush lied — people died”.

The much-maligned Bush surge strategy worked so much that Obama has followed Bush’s post-2005 strategy in Iraq and has replicated it in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus’s success in waging a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq saw his unanimous Senate confirmation last year in his role of taking over command in Afghanistan, despite the partisan opposition of many Democrat Senators when he was first appointed to the Iraq command by George W. Bush. Military and civilian deaths in Baghdad are now lower than the latter are in Obama’s home town of Chicago, and there have been three elections in Iraq since liberation, with a 62 per cent turnout in the most recent (2010) poll. This figure is higher than that of various US midterm elections.

Feith’s book details the extensive debate that was had inside the Bush Administration, regarding the war, and the considerable lengths to which Bush and his top officials went to devise every sensible way to resolve the issues and risks that Iraq posed, short of war. Again, this is contrary to the popular view of the warmongering Texan cowboy.

Finally, let’s assume the CIA had reported that Saddam had destroyed all his WMD stockpiles. The next question would have been “How readily could he produce significant amounts of chemical or biological material?” The answer was: Saddam had retained the personnel and facilities for the task and retained the intention to reinvigorate his programmes — the existence of programmes is more important than stockpiles. The post-war search was unable to unearth any substantial stockpiles, but the Iraq biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes remained active, and were easy to reactivate.