Things have been busy here at Marxists for Keynes, so haven’t been able to post as regularly…apologies. Dan Kennedy today weighs in on the WMD issue.
President Bush now has a chaotic mess on his hands — a mess that was predicted by those of us who opposed going to war without an explicit UN mandate.
Nevertheless, given that it now seems clear that Iraq’s WMD capability was, at the very least, nowhere near as great as the White House had claimed, it is a mystery as to why Saddam didn’t do more to save his worthless, evil ass.
In this regard he echoes Weekly Standard’s David Brooks comments on the NewsHour (”If he did destroy all the weapons or hide them or something, why didn’t he provide some evidence to the U.N. that he’d done this, and he could have prevented the entire war.”). I’d be eager to see more analysis on this question - it may be after all that Hussein was trying to play some kind of brinkmanship that might be hard to understand from the perspective of self-preservation. BUT… say that the Bush administration were using the WMD as a pretext for foreign policy aims it had well before 9/11 but were put into play by both domestic and foreign changes 9/11 brought. And say that Iraq didn’t believe that the issue was ever enforcing a standard that could be complied with. After all, when asked what Iraq could do to avoid invasion, the Administration pretty much answered that it would never be trustworthy and the only way Iraq could avoid regime change was by changing the regime itself. Iraq may not have been acting in its best interest, but it’s clear that the Bush administration was not interested in any kind of game theory which rewarded certain behavior and not others (witness the policy in North Korea, in which writing off the regime gave it no incentive to cooperate), it simply felt that the US had enough power not to have to play the same game it had been.
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