IRAQ IN REVIEW

 Editorial de  “The Washington Post” del 12.10.2003

A reader asks: "When are you going to admit you were wrong?" We've received a number of such inquiries (not all quite so polite) about our position on the war in Iraq, particularly from readers who were disappointed in our prewar stance. Now they cite several postwar surprises, or ostensible surprises: the absence of weapons of mass destruction, the absence of a proven connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and the continuing violence in Iraq. In light of these developments, it's important for supporters of military intervention to look back and, where necessary, reevaluate -- something the Bush administration so far has resisted.

We believe that there has been more progress in Iraq than critics acknowledge, but also that the administration has made serious mistakes. Before the war, we repeatedly urged President Bush to plan postwar reconstruction more thoroughly and to level with Congress and the American people about the likely costs. We urged him to take the time to draw more allies to the cause. Shortcomings in both cases have proved highly damaging, as has the Pentagon's insistence on monopolizing political control over Iraq.

Yet simply to blame the administration is not a full answer to our readers. Taking the measure of the administration, of Congress and of their likely ability to see this through was a prewar obligation, one of the factors in calculating risks and benefits. Moreover, postwar troubles and surprises were to be expected, even if they could not be precisely foretold. It's fair to ask now whether those troubles and surprises are so great as to prove the intervention unwise.

No matter how one answers that question, the critical judgments now involve future policy. It is essential that the United States do as much as possible to stabilize Iraq under a peaceable, representative government. It seems to us that opponents of the war ought to recognize, as some have, that this mission could be critical to the fight against terrorism and to the future of the Middle East. But insisting on doing the right thing now does not excuse supporters of the war from reexamining the judgments that led to this point.

Weapons of mass destruction. David Kay's 1,200-member survey team has reported that Saddam Hussein's nuclear program was "rudimentary" and that no large-scale production of chemical weapons occurred in recent years. We believed otherwise before the war, especially as regards chemical weapons, as did most governments with intelligence services. We have called on the Bush administration to account for what increasingly look like failures in the intelligence agencies' assessment of the Iraqi threat, as well as misstatements in the public case made for the war. The importance of this is hard to overstate: At issue is whether Americans, and the world, can believe U.S. intelligence on the activities of hostile, dangerous, but hard-to-penetrate states like Iraq; and whether this president can be trusted not to distort that intelligence in pursuit of his own agenda.

But at issue also is whether the war should have been fought. Don't we now know that Iraq posed no imminent threat to the United States and that there was thus no need or legal justification for an invasion? This question turns on the phrase "imminent threat," which was invoked before the war by leading opponents of intervention, such as Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). The Bush administration conveyed its own sense of dramatic urgency, and that too is something it should account for in light of what is now known. But we argued that the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent but cumulative: He had invaded his neighbors, used chemical weapons and pursued biological and nuclear arms. He threatened U.S. interests and security in a vital region and would continue to do so as long as he was in power. A decade of diplomacy, U.N. sanctions and no-fly-zone enforcement had failed to end that threat. Instead the credibility of the Security Council, along with constraints on the regime, had steadily eroded.

The debate over intervention was fraught precisely because many people understood that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent danger. We argued nonetheless that the real risk lay in allowing him to defy repeated U.N. disarmament orders, including Resolution 1441, the "final opportunity" approved by unanimous Security Council vote.

Though it pokes holes in U.S. intelligence and our assumptions, Mr. Kay's report contains much to substantiate this reasoning. Saddam Hussein, the report claims, never abandoned his intention to produce biological, chemical and nuclear arms -- and he was aggressively defying Resolution 1441. He also was successfully deceiving U.N. inspectors. They failed to discover multiple programs for developing illegal long-range missiles as well as a clandestine network of biological laboratories, among other things. From a legal standpoint, the report shows that Iraq should have been subject to the "serious consequences" specified by Resolution 1441 in the event of noncompliance. More important, it strongly suggests that in the absence of intervention Iraq eventually would have shaken off the U.N. inspectors and sanctions, allowing Saddam Hussein to follow through on his intentions. He would have been able to renew his attempt to dominate the region and its oil supplies, while deterring the United States with the threat of missiles topped with biological warheads. In acting to enforce the U.N. resolution, the United States eliminated a real, if not "imminent," threat, while ensuring that future Security Council ultimatums carry some weight.

Saddam and al Qaeda. Mr. Bush and other administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, exaggerated the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda and implied without foundation that Saddam Hussein may have had something to do with the attacks of 9/11. Critics add that since the invasion, terrorists seem to have flocked to Iraq, where the occupation has had to cope with a series of car and suicide bombings. The terrorism is worrisome, though the principal group behind it appears to be Ansar al-Islam, which was based in northern Iraq before the war and whose leader spent time in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.

For our part, we never saw a connection between Iraq and 9/11 or major collaboration between Saddam and al Qaeda. But we did perceive a broader threat, in the sense that Saddam Hussein had frequently collaborated with other terrorist organizations and could be reasonably expected to continue doing so. When combined with his continuing pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, that seemed to pose exactly the sort of threat that the Bush administration rightly focused on as part of the war on terrorism.

Continuing costs. The difficulty of rebuilding Iraq is huge. The steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded is agonizing. The strain on the U.S. military, its reserves and the families at home is growing. But these developments, while troubling, are not altogether surprising -- except maybe to those who believed the Bush administration's shallow prewar rhetoric. The calculation on intervention required a weighing of risks: the risk of allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power, defying U.N. demands, versus all the well-articulated risks of intervention. Before the war, these were frequently said to include starvation, an outpouring of refugees, a fracturing of Iraq, a descent into ethnic conflict or simple chaos. We believed that reconstruction would be long, costly and risky, and we judged nonetheless that intervention would be less risky than allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power.

Were we wrong? The honest answer is: We don't yet know. But at this stage we continue to believe that the war was justified and necessary, and that the gains so far have outweighed the costs. Each of the 326 American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq represents an irretrievable loss for family and friends. But the nation already has reaped great benefit from their sacrifice. One of the most aggressive and brutal dictators in the history of the Middle East has been eliminated, along with his proven programs to acquire deadly weapons. Millions of Iraqis have been freed from fear, and an opportunity has opened to bring much-needed political change to a region that is the source of the greatest security threats to the United States. Polls show a sometimes grateful, sometimes grudging willingness by most Iraqis to go along with U.S. plans for reconstruction.

Many Americans understandably have been surprised by the continuing casualties months after the president's appearance on an aircraft carrier under the banner "Mission Accomplished." Mr. Bush's abrupt submission last month of a large and poorly explained spending request to Congress also has strengthened public support for the idea that the Iraq mission must be failing. Yet the president's missteps have merely obscured the facts that these costs were inevitable, and that outside of the Sunni towns where support for Saddam Hussein was strongest, there is no quagmire -- only a slow, slogging progress forward.

Continued progress is far from guaranteed. In our view, the administration could improve the odds of success by forging a broader international coalition. For that to happen, the administration must drop its insistence on monopolizing power over Iraq's political transition, as well as the contracts for reconstruction. It must compromise with those well-meaning allies who want Iraq to succeed but disagree with U.S. tactics.

Success or failure in the effort to stabilize Iraq under a reasonably representative government that poses no threat to the world will provide the ultimate answer to the question of whether the war should have been undertaken. Because we continue to believe that U.S. security is at stake, we also believe that the United States must be prepared to dedicate troops and financial resources to that goal until it is achieved, even if it takes years. In our judgment success is possible, but much will depend on whether the administration and Congress face the magnitude of the challenge and summon the political courage and diplomatic skills necessary to meet it.