Our determination is paying off. The Downing Street Leaks have begun to penetrate the MSM, and the American consciousness. It pays to remember that the American electorate is not hard left or hard right. Most of us are not all that politically minded. In the lead up to war I had a lot of discussions with people who expressed the following sentiment:

I have my doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq, but I’ll support the effort. Yet, if they don’t find WMD, I am never going to forgive this administration.

There were many centrist non-political Americans that felt that way, and the Downing Street Leaks reveal the level of the deceit perpetrated on them. They feel a deep sense of betrayal.

There was no anthrax, no sarin, no VX, no scuds, no mobile chem/bio labs, no terrorist training camps, no links to al-Qaeda, no uranium, no nuclear program, no drones, no immanent threat, no ongoing genocide, no threat to their neighbors, and thus, no legal justification for invading a sovereign nation.

And now some on the right are being forced into a fallback position.

:::flip:::
You can read a mostly sincere attempt at crafting a fallback position in today’s Washington Post. Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, does the best he can:

To assess whether the Iraq war was worth it requires seriously posing the question: What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003? That is a missing but essential piece of the current very legitimate debate. We all know what has gone wrong since the Iraq war began, but it is not as if, in the absence of a war, everything would have gone right. Those who want to have this debate cannot simply point to the terrible toll in casualties. They have to address the question of what the alternative to war really would have meant.

I sympathize with Kagan here, but he is trying to force us to make a false choice. Saddam had proved himself to be a deft opponent throughout the nineties. He survived the 1991 uprising, and then turned the sanctions regime into a public relations disaster for the United States and Britain. He skillfully divided the Security Council with lucrative oil concessions and contracts.

The containment policy was failing from a number of standpoints. Saddam had actually consolidated his power, rather than having been weakened. The sanctions were taking an unacceptable humanitarian toll on the Iraqi people, and an annoying economic toll on the whole region. Islamic radicals were using the sanctions as a rallying cry to recruit terrorists. The no-fly zones required that we keep air bases in Saudi Arabia, which was also a major irritant for the Sauds, and a terrorist recruitment bonanza.

If Bush had been honest, and had he been willing to share the contracts in a post-Saddam Iraq, he should have been able to take this case to the international community and explain that we could not continue with the containment policy. He could have further explained that he didn’t trust Saddam Hussein to behave himself once the sanctions were lifted. He could have explained the threat to the Kurds that would arise if Saddam was giving a free hand within his own country.

In the aftermath of 9/11, it would not have been an unreasonable request for the United States to ask the Security Council to rethink the sanctions, and to help the Anglo forces find a graceful exit that didn’t pose an unacceptable security risk.

Perhaps, we could have crafted some kind of exile package for Saddam and his family. In return, a multinational force would enter Iraq and provide security, while a new government was developed. If Saddam wouldn’t voluntarily leave, our only military goal would be to drive him from power, and capture him if possible.

Some people will object that we had Saddam perfectly contained, and we could continue that policy indefinitely. I disagree.

Others will argue that the French and Russians never would have gone along with such a plan. I remind them that we have appropriated nearly $300 billion for this war. We certainly could have convinced enough Russians and Frenchmen with that amount of dough.

What we couldn’t do is convince them to go along with a war based on a pack of lies, that never envisioned a voluntary exile, and that ripped up all their contracts and replaced them with contracts for American companies.

Greed has been our achilles heel from the beginning of the debate over Iraq up until the present day. And dishonesty about our greedy motives has turned off the entire world. There was a case to be made for regime change in Iraq. The Bushies never made it. Now that they have been exposed as liars: fixing the intelligence, using the inspectors as a mere pretext, etc., they will undoubtedly begin to revert to an argument similar to the one I just made above. But the question isn’t: ‘What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003?’ The question is: ‘What would have happened if we had made an honest case, and had been willing to make the concessions necessary to get international support?’

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