If the Bush administration had wanted to make the case for going to war against Iraq on purely humanitarian reasons, it could have done so. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's truly bad guys, a horrific leader who brutalized and terrorized his own people. But the administration likely would have found much resistance from conservatives who have long argued that the United States should not try to act as the world's police department.
So the administration made national security its strongest case for launching an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally frowned-upon preemptive war.
Fast forward to the present: The administration that had 100 percent certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction has zero percent certainty as to where they are now. The White House and the president's defenders have reverted to their fall-back humanitarian position — that the removal of Hussein was justification enough for the war.
Bush's assertions about whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction have drawn intensified scrutiny since Monday, when the White House acknowledged for the first time that it should not have included an assertion in the president's State of the Union speech in January that Iraq tried to purchase uranium in Niger.
The admission emboldened Democrats, who yesterday began turning up the heat, attacking the president's credibility and in some cases accusing the administration of deliberately misleading the American public and the world about the threat posed by Iraq.
"This is a very important admission," Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle said yesterday. "It's a recognition that we were provided faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all of the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken, the sooner the better."
At a press conference today in South Africa, asked if he still believed that Hussein attempted to buy nuclear material in Africa, Bush sidestepped the question, responding that "he's not trying to buy anything right now. If he's alive, he's on the run. And that's to the benefit of the Iraqi people. But, look, I am confident that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program."
The administration now finds the human rights card a compelling rationale for the war — one with which the left finds it difficult to disagree. Somewhat ironically, the Bush administration relied on information gathered from liberal groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in making the humanitarian case against Iraq.
For the last decade, Human Rights Watch has been trying — mostly in vain — to draw U.S. attention to the human rights violations of the Hussein government. In his State of the Union speech in January, Bush described Hussein: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
What the president did not mention was that that atrocity occurred 15 years ago — when Ronald Reagan was president and his father was vice president. That administration opposed legislation calling for sanctions and the bill eventually died in Congress.
While members of the human rights community are elated at Hussein's removal, they remain nonetheless skeptical of the administration's motivations and rationale. First, was the threat posed to the United States and its allies imminent? And second, did the present-day human rights situation justify the ultimate remedy of war, which has killed 212 Americans and thousands of Iraqis?
Joe Stork, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East/North Africa division, said the discovery of mass graves alone justifies the claims about Hussein's regime made by his and other groups. But if there were a time for war, based solely on the human rights concern, it would have been 15 years ago, when the genocide was occurring, rather than now, critics on the left say.
"Look, the attention to human rights is long overdue," Stork said. "But to suggest that the U.S. has been pushing to hold Iraq accountable for human rights abuses while the rest of the world watches ... it's hard to find words for that kind of hubris. It almost defies words."
Is the left being hypocritical? Some would argue yes. The reason, Bush's supporters say, is politics — hatred of Bush. Some conservatives also argue that this sort of inconsistency underscores how out of touch liberals are with the real world, where tough options such as war are sometimes the only option.
Former Republican National Committee spokesman Clifford May escorted groups of Iraqi exiles to the White House this spring, where they met with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. They shared tales of Hussein's brutality — women being raped as a tool of political intimidation, political dissidents getting their tongues cut out, opponents being fed through meat grinders and dropped in acid vats. So the left's behavior is particularly perplexing to May.
"From the very beginning my organization and I were making the case that intervention was justified based just on the problem of human rights," May said, "and I think that argument has been strengthened by the end of the military phase of the war, as we have been finding mass graves adjacent to nearly every large town with the bodies of the tens of thousands of Iraqis who were executed for what Saddam Hussein perceived to be political crimes or opposition to him."
But the argument that Hussein's human rights record alone justifies the war in Iraq would establish yet a new foreign policy doctrine for the U.S., one that could keep the nation busy with wars for years to come, considering how full the world is of cruel dictators. There's Syria, Iran and China, of course, but we'll also have to add some of our allies, such as Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan, to the list.
Uzbekistan, which gave the U.S. military basing rights in the war against Afghanistan, is run by President Islam Karimov, by many accounts one of the world's most oppressive dictators. Karimov's government has been accused of oppressing religious Muslims by imprisoning those who speak against his regime and "detaining, arresting, and torturing relatives of pious Muslims."
"If President Bush is prepared to cite favorably our reports on Iraq, he should take with equal seriousness our reports on the many countries he identifies as allies, such as Uzbekistan, Russia and Colombia, where U.S. military aid has been approved despite the dismal failure of the Colombian government to meet human rights standards imposed by U.S. law," wrote Amnesty International's executive director in a letter to The Post a few months ago.
But May counters that the administration is beginning to do just that.
"Right now I believe we are on the verge of sending troops to Liberia not because we think Charles Taylor has weapons of mass destruction but because it is a human rights situation," May said. "It is hard for me to understand how anybody who opposed our intervention in Iraq can now be in favor of it in Liberia. The only substantial difference is we had a direct national security interest in Iraq and at best only indirect national security interest in Liberia."
Point well taken. But the administration is pondering a peacekeeping and humanitarian mission in Liberia, not an all-out war. And what happened in Iraq will continue to be viewed with skepticism by some if proof is not found to justify the original and most compelling rationale — U.S. national security.
It could be argued that the administration had justification enough to invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein's human rights record. So why did it emphasize the national security angle? After the war, evidence for the national security argument is sparse while mass graves in Iraq give proof of genocide and political assassinations. Perhaps Bush didn't push the human rights rationale harder because it would have created a precedent of intervention that would have been more politically perilous for Bush than the potential of exaggerating claims about Iraq's direct threat to Americans.
Whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush administration may have lied to or misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won't exonerate the president if the latter is true as well.
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