Let me move past the ideas that our casualties staggered us (we suffered losses at historically low rates and was not enough to stop us from winning or to break our Army).
Or that the Iraq War made us broke (we spent more in one stimulus spending signature than we did in the Iraq War up to then, and as a percent of GDP the war was very cheap compared to World War II).
Or that we will now need to replace weapons and equipment (I wish. And are we seriously to believe she wishes we could have replaced Cold War weapons had we not fought in Iraq?).
Or that the cost of veterans or wounded is too high (World War II veterans added way more and the numbers of wounded veterans from Iraq won't reverse that).
Or that the war left us with high oil prices (it didn't--but if it did, didn't the anti-war side say they wanted the public to sacrifice? And didn't our current president say he wanted higher oil prices to usher in our new Green future?).
Or that we don't know why we went to war (the declaration of war laid them out).
Or that Bush planned to defeat Saddam 8 months before 9/11 (so why did he wait and wasn't he just trying to implement the Clinton-era law that said regime change was the official policy of the United States?).
Or that intelligence was twisted (every intelligence agency--in the world--believed Saddam was hiding something and even Colin Powell was convinced by the evidence).
No, let me address this nonsense:
What’s less well-known, however, is that at the same time, United Nations inspectors were getting the story right. Their assessments of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs in the months leading up to the war were remarkably close to what was later found. Yet by insisting on invading before these inspections had time to succeed, the United States aborted what could have been a striking international success.
This is nonsense on ice.
In our pre-war attempt to get Saddam to come clean on WMD, the UN concluded that Saddam had not explained what it had done with everything we knew they had before the 1991 war was won.
The reality was that Saddam's nuclear program was at a standstill. But he retained the scientists and infrastructure to restart it. We also had the lesson of 1991 that Saddam was far closer to nukes than we imagined until we won that war.
The reality was that our post-2003 invasion investigation showed that Saddam's chemical weapons production capability was ready to be restarted within months of a decision to do so with supplies and infrastructure in place. Until Syria and perhaps some French and Russian sources open up, I don't assume Saddam had no chemical weapons before we invaded.
The reality was that the biological component was small but didn't need to be large to succeed. And we knew that in the mid-1990s Saddam had restarted that under the noses of inspections that followed the 1991 war.
The basic reality was that Saddam wanted WMD, wanted Iran to believe he had them until he could get them, and could have gotten them as sanctions collapsed under the constant propaganda barrage that poor Iraqi children were starving under sanctions even as Saddam built palaces (that were off limits to inspectors).
The basic reality was that Saddam had turned inspections on its head and Mathews accepts that. The Iraqis were supposed to show us exactly how they disarmed. It was not supposed to be a game of hide and seek where we seek and they hide. But that is exactly what it became. Under these circumstances, we could never conclude with certainty that Saddam had disarmed. There would always be doubt--in no small part because Saddam wanted that doubt to exist. No matter how many years went on, we'd always be in the position of saying we haven't found what we know Saddam had but has not confirmed he destroyed.
Her whining that--even 12 years after the war--the inspectors still hadn't had the chance to visit all the new sites they wanted to search demonstrates the bankruptcy of what was supposed to be a rapid process that counted on the full cooperation of the defeated Iraqis. Yet she assures us that it would have taken only another year to confirm disarmament! And in her fantasy world, open ended inspections would have continued with Iraqi cooperation, apparently.
And even if we did confirm that WMD programs and research were gone, sanctions would end. Who believes Saddam would not have been off to the races with WMD development at that point?
In the end, the "success" would be the success of pretending we had disarmed a thug through UN inspections and the success of allowing Saddam to pretend we had succeeded--for a while. Until he had no reason to pretend.
Oh, and here's the best part of her contention that we missed a chance for a striking success in WMD disarmament had we allowed inspections to succeed in Iraq:
Based on that success, a permanent inspections capability — under discussion after UNSCOM — might have been established in New York or Geneva. ...
From it, a WMD enforcement mechanism could have been built for use not only in Iraq but also in North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.
She thinks the threat of force for this new body would have worked, saying even Saddam retreated in the face of force, despite the fact that Saddam would not retreat even in the face of a US-led invasion army massed on his border poised to invade. And other rogue countries would have fallen in line!
Does this not remind anybody of the classic Steve Martin lesson in how to become a millionaire and pay no taxes? (First, get a million dollars ...)
Sadly, Saddam was the one who got to (repeatedly) deliver the punch line, "I forgot." And when confronted with her idiocy had we followed her brilliant plan, Ms. Mathews could deliver "Well excuse me!" to explain the error.
Face it, the only way to make sure that Saddam didn't get WMD was to destroy Saddam' regime. Mission accomplished. Pretending that we missed a fantasy world of magical international success and thug cooperation because we destroyed the Saddam regime and put a developing democracy in its place is just madness.
My God, Ms. Mathews really doesn't have two working brain cells to rub together, does she?
