America is safer because of a “justified mistake”

A new WashPost poll shows that Bush’s numbers have slumped and “a majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war.” But here’s a key graf:

While 21 percent said they believe that Bush lied about the threat posed by Iraq, a larger number -- 31 percent -- thought he exaggerated but did not lie. Indeed, six in 10 Americans believed, as Bush did, that Iraq had such weapons.

I think we can dismiss much of that 21% as the Democratic wing that wouldn’t vote for Bush if Osama Bin Laden was captured tomorrow. It’s understandable (although not necessarily forgivable) that Bush over-perceived the threat in Iraq, but to think he deliberately lied is simply slander. As Jonathan Rauch noted in the Atlantic: “The War in Iraq was the Right Mistake to Make,” everybody thought they saw a gun:

A policeman shoots a robber who has killed in the past and who brandishes what seems to be a gun. The gun turns out to be a cellphone. The policeman expects a thorough investigation (and ought to cooperate). In the end, if he is exonerated, it is not because he made no mistake but because his mistake was justified. Reasonable people, facing uncertainty, would have thought they saw a gun.

George W. Bush and the CIA thought they saw a gun. So did French President Jacques Chirac, who last February warned of Iraq's "probable possession of weapons of mass destruction." So did Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a former Vermont governor, who last February said, "My personal belief is that Saddam may well possess anthrax and chemical weapons. That being the case, he must be disarmed."

If reasonable people thought Saddam possessed forbidden weapons, that was because Saddam sought to give the impression that he possessed them. He may have believed he possessed them. (His fearful and corrupt scientists, Kay hypothesized, may have been running a sham weapons program.) For four years after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq successfully hid its chemical weapons program. When a defector blew the whistle, weapons inspectors were stunned at the extent of Saddam's deception. The Iraqis responded not by coming clean but by redoubling their efforts to obstruct and intimidate—for example, interfering with inspectors' helicopter flights and, at one point, firing a grenade into their headquarters. No one could have failed to conclude that Saddam was hiding the truth.

And what is the end result of, as Rauch puts it, the “justified mistake?” As Charles Krauthammer notes in “The Other Shoe,” we haven’t had another terrorist attack in America, minor or major:

Add to that a forward strategy of attacking not only the terrorists but the states that support them. Maybe al Qaeda does lack the capacity for even simple terrorism on U.S. soil. If so, it speaks well for an administration that, immediately after Sept. 11, designed and carried out a radically new strategy, both offensive and defensive, to fight the war on terror.

It’s impossible to measure the abstract of a free Iraq versus 500+ dead American soldiers. I’d like to think they died to prevent another 9/11, another U.S.S. Cole, another Khobar Towers. I’d also like to think the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein, Libya giving up their weapons, Syria on the ropes, and Al-Qaeda on the run.