On Sunday, November 20, Democratic Senator Joe Biden peddled the “imminent threat” myth. Here’s the exchange he had with Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace:
WALLACE: I don’t think that the vice president ever said anything about an imminent threat. And actually, some Democrats did. BIDEN: Oh, he did. No, no, he did. He did, and as did the administration. They talked about the threat being imminent. They talked about there’s a — remember mushroom clouds, remember the — you know, look, the whole point about this was whether or not there was an imminent threat requiring us to go to war when we did. If there was no imminent threat, we had time to continue to try to isolate Saddam Hussein, continue to keep inspectors in there, try to make a deal with the international community to keep this pressure on.
In fact, the vice president never said Iraq was an “imminent threat,” unlike Jay Rockefeller (“I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat…”) and John Kerry’s running mate (“I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country… I think each of them have to be dealt with on their own merits. And they do, in my judgment, present different threats. And I think Iraq and Saddam Hussein present the most serious and most imminent threat.”) Here is what the president stated in his 2003 State of the Union address:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.
Sen. Biden’s other point about efforts “to try to isolate Saddam Hussein, continue to keep inspectors in there, try to make a deal with the international community to keep this pressure on” is worth some review. In “The Right War for the Right Reasons,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan write:
By the time inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002, Saddam was ready to be a little more forthcoming, because he had rejiggered his program to withstand somewhat greater scrutiny. He had scaled back to a skeletal program, awaiting the moment when he could breathe life back into it. Nevertheless, even then he could not let the inspectors see everything. Undoubtedly he hoped that if he could get through that last round, he would be home free, eventually without sanctions or further inspections. We now know that in early 2003, Saddam assumed that the United States would once again launch a bombing campaign, but not a full scale invasion. So he figured he would survive, and, as Kay concluded, “They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their programs.” Was this a satisfactory outcome? If this much had been accomplished, if we had succeeded in getting Saddam to scale back his programs in the hope of eventually turning them on again, was that a reason not to go to war? Kay does not believe so. Nor do we. If the United States had pulled back last year, we would have placed ourselves in the trap that Berger had warned about five years earlier. We would have returned to the old pattern of “Iraqi defiance, followed by force mobilization on our part, followed by Iraqi capitulation,” followed by a new round of Iraqi defiance–and the wearing down of both the international community and the United States. There was an argument against going to war last year. But let’s remember what that argument was. It had nothing to do with whether or not Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and WMD programs. Everyone from Howard Dean to the New York Times editorial board to Dominique de Villepin and Jacques Chirac assumed that he had both. Most of the arguments against the war concerned timing. The most frequent complaint was that Bush was rushing to war. Why not give Blix and his inspectors another three months or six months? We now know, however, that giving Blix a few more months would not have made a difference. Last month Kay was asked what would have happened if Blix and his team had been allowed to continue their mission. Kay responded, “All I can say is that among an extensive body of Iraqi scientists who are talking to us, they have said: The U.N. interviewed us; we did not tell them the truth, we did not show them this equipment, we did not talk about these programs; we couldn’t do it as long as Saddam was in power. I suspect regardless of how long they had stayed, that attitude would have been the same.” Given the “terror regime of Saddam,” Kay concluded, he and his team learned things after the war “that no U.N. inspector would have ever learned” while Saddam was still in power. So it is very unlikely that, given another three months or six months, the Blix team would have come to any definitive conclusion one way or another. Nor, therefore, would there have been a much greater probability of winning a unanimous vote at the Security Council for war once those additional six months had passed. Whether the United States could have kept 200,000 troops on a permanent war footing in the Persian Gulf for another six months is even more doubtful.
To be continued.
