by Jim Rose in defence economics, politics - USA

The renegade left so hates George W Bush that it could not bring itself to make the most obvious argument against invading Iraq. That argument was the one I made at the time.

It is the height of folly to attack a country with weapons of mass destruction with the intent of conquering it. That intent of conquest and regime change gives the other side every incentive to use their weapons of mass destruction if only in an act of desperation. The whole purpose of weapons of mass destruction is to deter invasions.

Rather than concede the other side’s argument and use it against them, the renegade left preferred every other argument, most of which bolstered the case for invasion.

The most obvious of these was more weapons inspections by the UN instead of invasion. If there is a need for more weapons inspections, there must be some WMD weapons to find. The UN had 12 years to find these and still cannot find them all.

What was the point of the UN inspections and the renegade left calling for the inspections to continue as an alternative to invading in 2003 unless they expected to find more evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons?



The reality is Saddam played a fine game of bluff. He destroyed his WMD capability early after the first Iraq war. He could not be afforded be found with WMDs.

Saddam then tricked everybody into believing that he still had weapons of mass destruction as a way of projecting strength, especially to regional rivals.

It is also the case that if the UN inspections stopped, Saddam would have resumed his WMD armament program.

It is not possible to stop countries from developing WMDs. You can deter them from using them. Far more volatile characters in Russia and China in the 50s and 60s were deterred from using nuclear weapons.