It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

POWELL FAILS TO MAKE CASE: a half-hearted attempt to fisk Katrina vanden Heuvel's piece on this subject> She starts out with

As international and domestic doubts and opposition to war grow . . .

Really? Somehow I thought that the fact that the leaders of Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Denmark, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all signed letters of support for Bush's position on Iraq might be an indication that the tide is turning in favor of Bush. And domestic public opinion seems more in line with Britain than with France:

In the aftermath of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's address to the United Nations, a growing majority of Americans now say the United States has presented enough evidence to justify going to war with Iraq, according to a new washingtonpost.com-ABC News poll.

Overall, more than six in 10 Americans-61 percent-believe that the Bush administration has made the case for war, up from 54 percent in a survey conducted last week after the president's State of the Union address.

She continues:

Powell's multimedia presentation contained many specific allegations but little new information or proof of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no smoking gun. Instead, nearly all of the evidence was largely circumstantial or speculative. (Indeed, hours before Powell spoke, UN weapons inspections chief Hans Blix denied or discounted four claims central to Powell's indictment.)

She doesn't elaborate on the specifics of the four claims that Blix "denied or discounted" so I don't know how to deal with this particular fact. More generally, though, Powell's "largely circumstantial or speculative" evidence includes a transcript of the following conversation between an Iraqi brigadier general and colonel (see here for the entire speech):

We didn't destroy it. We didn't line it up for inspection. We didn't turn it into the inspectors. We evacuated it to make sure it was not around when the inspectors showed up.

Now it may be "speculative" in that it isn't entirely clear what the "it" is, but one can be fairly certain that they weren't discussing hiding back issues of The Nation from the inspectors. Powell continues

While we were here in this council chamber debating Resolution 1441 last fall, we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agents to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. Most of the launchers and warheads have been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection.

We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities.

And continues

In this next example, you will see the type of concealment activity Iraq has undertaken in response to the resumption of inspections. Indeed, in November 2002, just when the inspections were about to resume, this type of activity spiked. Here are three examples.

At this ballistic missile site, on November 10, we saw a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components. At this biological weapons-related facility, on November 25, just two days before inspections resumed, this truck caravan appeared, something we almost never see at this facility, and we monitor it carefully and regularly.

At this ballistic missile facility, again, two days before inspections began, five large cargo trucks appeared along with the truck-mounted crane to move missiles. We saw this kind of house cleaning at close to 30 sites.

Days after this activity, the vehicles and the equipment that I've just highlighted disappear and the site returns to patterns of normalcy. We don't know precisely what Iraq was moving, but the inspectors already knew about these sites, so Iraq knew that they would be coming.

We must ask ourselves: Why would Iraq suddenly move equipment of this nature before inspections if they were anxious to demonstrate what they had or did not have?

I'm not sure what constitutes a "smoking gun" but anyone who honestly believes the Iraqi claims that they have no WMD's and are fully cooperating must be smoking something else. In the end, as I noted earlier, the issue is not really a "smoking gun" or the lack thereof, the parties involved already have their minds made up (and their speeches written). Those who opposed the war will still oppose it.

Why not go to war? She answers:

Any benefits of going to war to remove Saddam Hussein are outweighed by the possible unintended consequences of fueling anti-Americanism in the Islamic world; undermining the global fight against terrorism; increasing terrorism at home; helping Al Qaeda win more recruits, destabilizing Pakistan, Turkey and other countries in the region; and risking the lives of US and other troops and Iraqi civilians. Furthermore, the moral, political and economic costs of a likely postwar occupation would mean more spending on war and less on homeland security and unmet domestic needs.

and

If Washington bullies other Security Council members into acquiescing in an American war, the council's legitimacy will forever be eroded, having become an instrument of a war-hungry administration and no longer an instrument of the rule of law.

Of course the counter-argument is that failure to act on the fairly clear and unequivocal language contained in UN Resolution 1441 will also destroy the UN's credibility. In the end, giving this scathing indictment of the UN by James Lileks,

Perhaps you mean that we need the moral imprimatur of this august and esteemed body. You'd have a better point if the United Nations was moral, august or esteemed. On the contrary: The United Nations is a dim hive of self-interested parties engaged in endless parliamentary mummery, united by a consensual delusion that all nations are equal.

So you have the bitterly risible sight of Libya chairing the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which is akin to giving Kid Rock control over the New York Philharmonic. You have the 2003 disarmament conference rotating its presidency among a group of states that includes Iran and Iraq. (Perhaps next year the agricultural planning conference will be held in Pyongyang.) You have the shameful performance of the peacekeepers in Srebrenica, looking away while thousands were slaughtered. You have the sex-for-food scandal at U.N. refugee camps in Africa -- if it happened at an American frat house, it would be national news for a week.

And you have small, telling scenes like the one that transpired in Baghdad recently. A man thrust himself into a U.N. inspector's car and begged for sanctuary. The U.N. official pretended to study his papers while the poor man pleaded for his life. The Iraqi guards took the man away, and if what we know about Iraqi prisons is even half right, we can only hope they killed the man as soon as he was out of camera range.

Imagine you are running in fear from Iraqi thugs, and you see a U.N. car, and a U.S. convoy. To which would you run?

I don't know that the end of the UN as we now know it is all that bad of a thing.

Having said all of this, I am still opposed to going to war. The problem is I can't seem to find anyone who can articulate compelling and consistent reasons for opposing war that make sense to me. If anyone has come across such a case, please let me know.