Defusing the smoking gun

How did Colin Powell get so much wrong about Iraq?

By Fred Kaplan
SLATE.COM

Aug. 12 — In the middle of a fascinating article in Monday’s Los Angeles Times, which quotes several former Iraqi officers on why they lost the war so badly, the following passage leaps out: Commanders interviewed for this article said they were issued no orders regarding chemical or biological weapons. And they denied that Iraq ever possessed such weapons.

THE TRUTH OF this denial is, by now, close to inescapable. Too much time has passed, too many suspicious sites have been inspected, too many knowledgeable sources have been interrogated, for much doubt to remain on the matter. Maybe a ton of VX will be unearthed in Ahmed’s basement tomorrow, but this is unlikely — and, at this point, few would regard such a find as authentic.

Whatever officials and apologists may say about it in retrospect, the belief in Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” was the only compelling reason, really, to have fought this war. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and his toppling is welcome. But the same could be said of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, with whom the Bush administration is now (properly) preparing to negotiate, or of Liberia’s Charles Taylor, whose exile didn’t strike Bush as worth the commitment of more than a handful of Marines. Even Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s intellectual architect of Gulf War II, admitted in his famous Vanity Fair interview that Iraqi human rights alone would not have justified the sacrifice of American soldiers.