July 30, 2004

George Will and WMDs

Conservative pundit George Will remarkably writes today that President Bush:

exhausted presidential ability to take preemptive military action by doing so against a nation that lacked the attribute that could justify it -- possession of weapons of mass destruction by a regime likely to use them. Yes, the world is better off because Bush rid Iraq of the regime that filled the mass graves, but he does not argue that human rights horrors justify preemptive war.

At least Will is rather consistent on this point. In June 2003, just a few months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, we wrote a piece saying that the "doctrine of preemption -- the core of the president's foreign policy -- is in jeopardy" because of the "failure to find or explain the absence of weapons of mass destruction that were the necessary and sufficient justification for preemptive war."

The problem with this analysis, as I have pointed out before (in fact, around the same time that Will first took his stand), is that Bush is in fact arguing that human rights justified the war. Without WMDs and the al Qaeda threat in Iraq, all that is left to justify taking out Saddam is that he was a bad guy. Bush can't utter the words "human rights" because that would concede that his boys ginned up the intelligence to make a fake case for war, that today rests on the leftiest of all liberal justifications.

 Posted by glenn

Comments