There were over two dozen foreign intelligence agencies that agreed that Saddam either had or was attempting to build or purchase weapons of destruction. Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to hide anywhere on earth, but many other types of weapons of mass destruction aren't difficult to dispose of.
That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just the United States.
You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.
Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them just the same as Americans.
"had or was attempting to build or purchase" is a pretty weak standard. Do I qualify if I put an ad on craigslist asking if anyone has some spare anthrax? How about if I doodle a nuclear weapon design on a napkin?
I don't doubt Saddam was trying to develop or purchase WMD. But absent the capability of doing so, such attempts mean nothing.
Regardless, it was obvious that Iraq was not a threat to the US. Even if Iraq had had a hundred nuclear bombs, there was no way to deliver them. If you're on the other side of the planet, WMD doesn't matter without ICBMs or long-range bombers to take them to the target.
Did two dozen foreign intelligence agencies go so far as to agree that Iraq was an imminent threat that needed to be stopped by overwhelming force? Somehow, I'm guessing they did not.
One can debate the specific details, but one can't really debate the question of whether Iraq was a threat to the United States in 2003. They were not, and it was patently obvious to anyone paying the least bit attention.
I thought it was obvious, but out of those two dozen intelligence agencies, some of them thought that he had weapons of mass destruction, and some of them thought that he was merely trying to acquire them. Perhaps I should have worded it more clearly.
That being said, I wasn't attempting to evaluate whether the evidence we had was strong enough to go to war or not. I was simply stating that a good portion of the world's intelligence agencies came to the same conclusions that we did about Saddam's capabilities and intentions.
I also didn't claim that anyone else opted to start a war, clearly they didn't.
Here in Brazil when the USA started its war movements, I do not met a single person that believed the "intelligence" agencies around the world, people here believed that it was all fake to steal more oil...
When they found no WMD on Iraq, people here was like: "A ha! I told you! US people are just evil liars that steal from people!"
In fact, I really, really, really do not understand how someone can believe that bullshit. Or your countries out there have incredibly stupid people on intelligence agencies, or your population is incredibly stupid and believe agencies that lie all the time. To us here the behaviour of US population supporting whatever crap CIA says is just baffling.
The number of death is probably more an effect of the general destabilization of the country (which gave ample room, as an example, for various exactions on minorities in Irak besides the war, in particular on Christians) rather than direct casualties.
I don't doubt for a moment that American and other Western soldiers were trying hard to avoid civilian casualties. It's deeply unfair to blame them for things they didn't do or for decisions they didn't make and never would have made had it been up to them. That being said, there are a couple problems with your argument. First, it's not the case that dozens of intelligence agencies believed the WMD propaganda. They would have been utterly incompetent if they had. They're far from perfect, of course, but no way are they that stupid and certainly not on that scale.
Rather, what happened is that political leaders pressured the leaders of the intelligence agencies (essentially political positions in their own right) into delivering reports that gave the "right" (i.e. the wrong) answers irrespective of what their professional analysts really thought. Few intelligence agencies could withstand the overt political pressure that was applied to the CIA and others (largely out of the Vice President's office, as I understand it) in the run-up to that war—after all, ultimate power resides with the political leaders in a democracy for obvious reasons. Note, however, that when the same leaders tried to do it again a few years later, enough of the professionals' real opinions was leaked to make a repeat manipulation impossible. I have in mind the unanimous assessment of US intelligence agencies in 2007 that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons (an assessment that still stands, incidentally, and is still unanimous, though you'd not guess it from the news). When political pressure started to be applied to distort that opinion, someone leaked a summary of it to the press, and that put an Iran war off the table for the rest of the GWB administration. Bush writes about that in his memoirs.
The other problem with your argument is that by the Nuremberg standards, war of aggression is understood to be the "supreme international crime" that encompasses all the evils that take place as a result of the war [1]. That is, the Nuremberg standard of justice considers all the secondary consequences of war (such as Iraq underwent with bombings, civil war, etc.) to be subsumed under the original crime of a war of aggression. This arguably makes sense, since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war. By this standard, soldiers are not responsible for atrocities they didn't commit, but the leaders who started the war in the first place actually are. Since that is the standard of justice that we (rightly) apply to others, we ought not to reject it or minimize it when it applies to ourselves. (The standard won't be applied in this case, of course, but that's a separate issue.)
The above is how I understand it from the sources I've read, anyway. Factual corrections are more than welcome.
There is no doubt that Iraq did have chemical weapons [1], that chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction [2]. There's also no doubt that the nebulousness of the term was used by both sides in the debate to steer conversation. The ridiculous assertion at one point that Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weaponry [3] muddied those waters even more.
Iraq did have chemical weapons (WMDs). They had demonstrated a willingness to use them on civilian populations [1]. Iraq possibly still had active WMDs at the end of the 1998 inspections. Chemical weaponry tends to have a fairly short shelf life, though, and stockpiles need to be constantly replenished. We did not ever find WMDs in iraq after the 2003 invasion, but we did find the labs to make them and the evidence that they had been manufactured at some point. This was not news, because we knew that Iraq had WMDs. It was considered insane by most western agencies that a dictator as mad as Hussein was would willingly disarm; Willingly let the stockpiles he was known to have had of WMDs simply wither and rot. Every major intelligence agency believed that Hussein had WMDs.
>>since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war.
Uh...
This happened: A starts a war W with B. As a follow on effect, some groups inside B starts a civil war W2 with others in B.
You say that A is responsible for the second war W2 too, which they didn't start and even actively tried to stop?!
After the war, when does A stop being responsible for everything bad that happens to B, done by B themselves? After 10 years? 100?
You just blame A for everything, including the weather? :-)
(It is easy to make a good argument that the W2 war would probably have happened anyway, at some point. Or that Saddam was already doing a continuous civil war with his army/police against everyone but his supporters, to keep power. You might even argue, but not with your definitions, that USA is responsible for all those killed by Saddam when they didn't topple him in the first Gulf war...)
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it is what the Nuremberg principles say (as I understand them) and that this has not even seemed controversial in the past, as long as it was we who were applying the principles to others.
It's hardly fair to make those the principles of international justice when we are doing the judging but suspend them in the case of our own activities.
Yes - A is responsible. If I set fire on half of a fireworks factory, I definitely could be hold responsible if the other half burns down to.
Saddam was keeping Iraq relatively stable. The toppling of the regime was done so clumsy with so little idea what to do next that it enabled the sliding down of Iraq into the madness that culminated in 2006-7
"This happened: A starts a war W with B. As a follow on effect, some groups inside B starts a civil war W2 with others in B.
You say that A is responsible for the second war W2 too, which they didn't start and even actively tried to stop?!"
Well, let's see, the argument at Nuremberg was that Germany invaded Poland and sought diplomatic efforts to avoid conflicts with Britain and France, but those two attacked them over the invasion of Poland, which was Germany's war of aggression.
So, it seems to me that if Germany was in a war of aggression against Britain, then the same applies to the US being in a war of aggression against the insurgents.
I'd argue the US contributed to "W2" through "De-Ba'athification," disbanding the Iraqi military, and the incompetence of the occupation (eg insufficient troops to enforce martial law/secure weapons caches). This isn't simply claiming the benefit of hindsight because there were many people warning about these decisions at the time.
I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it.
There is a contradiction in there, if you think about it.
(People do make lots of mistakes in war, but the Bush administration did make a new face for f-ckups while handling the Iraq occupation. They did get lots of help from the Iranians to trip up, the guy arguing for disbanding the Iraqi military was working with them.)
> I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it.
So let's consider this story. Germany invades Poland and tries to resolve the tension between itself and France and Britain. France and Britain declare war on Germany.
Who is the aggressor? Are we to agree, in the end, with Reichspresident und Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz and recognize that who is the aggressor is a political determination (presumably dependent on who wins the war)? Or do we accept that since the situation seems reversed in Iraq we should hold ourselves accountable?
It seems to me that this is largely confirmation that Doenitz was right, that "aggressor" is a term to be decided by the victor. I suppose we can say that aggressors never win wars ;-)
But Germany essentially went to war in WWI to defend their allies, who had suffered what was quite arguably an act of war, namely a terrorist attack on their dignitaries on foreign soil, and which the nationalities involved were, according to them, not very cooperative. Now if you argue that is not the same, then the US invasion of Afghanistan is also a US war of aggression.
That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just the United States.
You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.
Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them just the same as Americans.