"Will Bush be vindicated? A case for the Iraq War"

Will Bush be vindicated? A case for the Iraq War, by Jeff McIntyre - National Observer, No 84, 2011: A carefully documented and cited summary that the case for war against Iraq in 2003 was based on sound evidence that all major Western intelligence services agreed on.

[A]ll six of the world’s major external intelligence agencies, as well as prominent politicians and senior officials in the U.S. Democrat and Republican parties, were persuaded, by their respective pieces of intelligence evidence, that Saddam had WMDs. This is quite a different kettle of fish from the mantra of the anti-war Left that “Bush lied — people died”. 

The much-maligned Bush surge strategy worked so much that Obama has followed Bush’s post-2005 strategy in Iraq and has replicated it in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus’s success in waging a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq saw his unanimous Senate confirmation last year in his role of taking over command in Afghanistan, despite the partisan opposition of many Democrat Senators when he was first appointed to the Iraq command by George W. Bush. Military and civilian deaths in Baghdad are now lower than the latter are in Obama’s home town of Chicago, and there have been three elections in Iraq since liberation, with a 62 per cent turnout in the most recent (2010) poll. This figure is higher than that of various US midterm elections. 

Feith’s book details the extensive debate that was had inside the Bush Administration, regarding the war, and the considerable lengths to which Bush and his top officials went to devise every sensible way to resolve the issues and risks that Iraq posed, short of war. Again, this is contrary to the popular view of the warmongering Texan cowboy. 

Finally, let’s assume the CIA had reported that Saddam had destroyed all his WMD stockpiles. The next question would have been “How readily could he produce significant amounts of chemical or biological material?” The answer was: Saddam had retained the personnel and facilities for the task and retained the intention to reinvigorate his programmes — the existence of programmes is more important than stockpiles. The post-war search was unable to unearth any substantial stockpiles, but the Iraq biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes remained active, and were easy to reactivate.