Kerry leaves opening for Bush on Iraq obsession

More on last night's presidential debate

It should have been quite easy for John Kerry to corner President Bush on his obsession with Iraq. Kerry tried with some success, but he left powerful ammunition off the table. After that Kerry substituted the weak notion of a "global test" for use of pre-emptive war for the strong notion that the invasion of Iraq was illegal.

Bush's performance mirrored his early-post-September-11 non sequitur. One might have thought Kerry would have had at his disposal the statements of former National Security Council official Richard Clarke, given in his book Against All Enemies and in interviews. Clarke has described the Bush tendency to abruptly switch the subject to Iraq, no matter what the question:

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't -- wouldn't like the answer." (CBS, 60 Minutes, 3/21/2004)

Now let's take a look at this exchange from the debate last night:

KERRY: Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."

Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. al Qaeda attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist.

They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.

That's the enemy that attacked us. That's the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That's the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.

He also said Saddam Hussein would have been stronger. That is just factually incorrect. Two-thirds of the country was a no-fly zone when we started this war. We would have had sanctions. We would have had the U.N. inspectors. Saddam Hussein would have been continually weakening.

If the president had shown the patience to go through another round of resolution, to sit down with those leaders, say, "What do you need, what do you need now, how much more will it take to get you to join us?" we'd be in a stronger place today.

LEHRER: Thirty seconds.

BUSH: First of all, of course I know Osama bin Laden attacked us. I know that.

And secondly, to think that another round of resolutions would have caused Saddam Hussein to disarm, disclose, is ludicrous, in my judgment. It just shows a significant difference of opinion.

We tried diplomacy. We did our best. He was hoping to turn a blind eye. And, yes, he would have been stronger had we not dealt with him. He had the capability of making weapons, and he would have made weapons.

Instead of pressing on Bush obsession with Iraq above all else, Kerry gave Bush the "another resolution" opening and Bush jumped through it like an agile leopard. Bush was able to leave behind Kerry's strong criticism of how al Qaeda escaped at Tora Bora and the fine rhetorical flourish about outsourcing to Afghan warlords. Now Kerry looks like a wimp for putting American security below international process.

Of course Kerry is right -- legal US intervention in Iraq, if such could have been legal under any circumstances absent imminent threat -- would have at the very minimum required an additional UN Security Council resolution. This is the shame of so much administration rhetoric on international process. Again and again they cite UNSCR 1441 and previous resolutions as their basis for justification -- with the peculiar notion that the US must ignore international law in order to enforce it. UNSCR 1441 did not, as Deep Blade Journal has pointed out many times, confer on the United States authority for automatic war in the event of breach (self-determined) by Iraq.

But none of this matters to Bush because his only goal is to stir jingoism within the voting public. Truths of history have no role in promotion of this goal. Bush is again using his oft-repeated falsehoods that Iraq ignored UN resolutions and that it was ludicrous to think the UN inspection process had resulted in any progress disarming Saddam. As it turns out, Iraq was totally disarmed in all areas cited by Bush.

I had intended to do additional analysis on these points, but the fine blogger Rodger Payne has posted just what I want to say about Saddam's "intention to disarm". I may add some additional comments on pre-emptive war later...