Questions never asked at the O.K. Corral Bush-Russert press event Sunday: Is the world, especially the Middle East, better off with the overthrow and capture of Saddam Hussein? Is there a chance that a democratic Iraq will bring peace and stability to the Middle East?
I hope President Bush will ask these questions of his opponent during the presidential debates. If one were to ask: Is the world better off without a Soviet Union or a Nazi Germany, the answer would be a resounding “Yes.” If one were to ask the people of Kuwait are they better off with Saddam gone, these onetime victims of Baathist aggression would agree and so would Saddam’s oil-rich neighbors whose sovereignty Saddam threatened.
It’s time that President Bush stop being defensive about the intelligence failure. World history is full of intelligence failures, going back to the CIA of antiquity, which assured the Trojan warlords that the wooden horse outside their walls was nothing to worry about. In the case of Troy, bad intelligence led to defeat. In America’s case, it led to the ouster of a genocidal dictator. What’s bad about that?
What has yet to be understood is why, if Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, he didn’t simply tell the U.N. Security Council on the fateful day of Secretary of State Powell’s ultimatum: “Okay, send in anybody you want right now and let them hunt for the WMDs”? That would have stopped dead in its tracks any U.S. invasion and Saddam would probably still be in power. Only a psychiatrist could answer that question, if anybody could.
And as for being “alone” in the war against Saddam, in June 1940 Britain stood alone against Hitler. France had fallen, all of Western Europe was in Nazi hands, Britain had been defeated at Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe bombing of Britain was beginning. Churchill’s answer? Very well, alone. Churchill was proven right and the appeasers who were pressing for a deal with Hitler, wrong.
Perhaps this Churchill story might be helpful: During a 1938 House of Commons debate about the defense budget around Munich-time, Churchill was demanding more air defense. Someone shouted out, “How much is enough?” The future prime minister replied that he was reminded of the man who received a telegram from Brazil informing him of the death of his mother-in-law and requesting instructions. “Embalm, cremate, bury at sea,” the man wired back, “Take no chances.”
–Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for the Washington Times.