William Kristol and Robert Kagan: The Right War for the Right Reasons

This blog is in a series of posts from my readings of THE RIGHT WAR? THE CONSERVATIVE DEBATE ON IRAQ. Please contribute your comments. The following is a discussion of Chapter 2, a republished article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, February 23, 2004, THE WEEKLY STANDARD.


In February 2004, William Kristol and Robert Kagan published an article in The Weekly Standard, "The Right War for the Right Reasons." Published nearly a year after the war in Iraq began, the article seems to have been published to explain why the war was still just even if no weapons of mass destruction are found. In a sense, they are restating the case for war, minus the WMD argument. They argue, in fact, that WMD was never the main reason to go into Iraq and that there were multiple factors at play. Let's dissect their rationale.

First, they argue that liberating the Iraqi people from a brutal totalitarian regime would have been "sufficient reason" to remove Saddam. They argue that "such a rationale is not 'merely moral.' As is so often the case in international affairs, there was no separating the nature of Saddam’s rule at home from the kinds of policies he conducted abroad.” They also talk about Saddam's ambition to dominate the Middle East, both economically and militarily by trying to control the region's oil supply and intimidate its neighbors.

Next, they go back to the Clinton years and they show us the evidence that President Bill Clinton and his National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, are on record as saying that containemtn of Saddam Hussein would not be enough. It was the Clinton Administration that concluded that the longer the standoff with Saddam continued, the harder it would be to maintain international support against him. For these reasons, Berger and the Clinton Administration had concluded that it would be necessary at some point to move beyond containment to regime change. If the status quo persisted much longer, the U.S. would have continuing difficulties of determining whether or how fast the risk from Saddam was increasing.

Kristol and Kagan then show us the steps the U.S. took to get to war. These steps began with the Clinton Adminstration when the U.S. Congress passed the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act. Signed by Clinton, the Act made it official U.S. policy to “support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”

Fast forward to September 11, 2001. While there may have been no connection between Saddam and 9/11, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made the Bush administration take a closer look at international threats, as it became clear to all of us that we had been too sanguine about such threats prior to 9/11. The Bush administration concluded that it had to remove Saddam’s regime after all, just as Clinton and Berger had suggested might someday be necessary.

Bush then went on to gain sweeping support from both Republicans and Democrats. Kristol and Kagan point out that the majority of the Democrat Party supported the war, not because they were misled by rhetorical hype or by faulty U.S. intelligence. They were presented with the same rhetoric (if not with less hype) that had been presented by the Clinton administration. Most of what they and everyone knew about Saddam’s weapons programs we learned from the U.N. inspectors, not from U.S. intelligence.

After the war, David Kay spent about 8 months looking for weapons, interviewing Iraqis, and concluded there were "no stockpiles of weapons." And the drive-by media was all over this statement. But, Kristol and Kagan ask us to look at the rest of what Kay presented. Kay testified that Saddam's regime was “in clear material violation of 1441.”

So, even if we are to make a case based on WMDs, Kagan and Kristol conclude with a question: “If the world had known in February 2003 of Kay’s findings, that there were no stockpiles of weapons, but that Iraq continued to pursue weapons of mass destruction programs and to deceive and conceal these efforts from the U.N. inspectors led by Blix during the time allocated by Resolution 1441 – wouldn’t there have been at least as much, and probably more, support for the war?”

They then remind us that before the war, everyone agreed and assumed Saddam had weapons, this was not part of the argument to go to war. “Indeed, the fact that he had the weapons, some argued, was all the more reason why the United States should not go to war. After all, it was argued, the likeliest scenario for Saddam’s actually using the weapons he had was in the event of an American invasion.” I remember this being precisely my main reason not to go to war with Iraq. Why give Saddam the opportunity to use his weapons on our troops?

They tackle the question of imminence and use a quote by Tom Daschle, who after voting to support the war in October 2002, said, “The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent, but it is real, it is growing, and it cannot be ignored.”

Finally, Kagan and Kristol ask whether this was a war of choice or a war of necessity. They argue that in some sense, all of America’s wars were wars of choice. “But when viewed in the context of history and international circumstances, they were all based on judgments about the costs of inaction, the benefits of action, and on strategic calculations that action then would be far preferable to action later in less favorable circumstances. In other words, war was necessary to our national interest, if not absolutely necessary to the immediate protection of the homeland.”

I think they make the case that this war was the right war for the right reasons. I don't think we have to agree with their case necessarily, but it is a well-grounded argument for the reasons to go to war. The biggest strength of their case, I believe, was their argument that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 made the Bush administration take a closer look at international threats. Before 9/11, our biggest international conflict was with Saddam. We had a 10-year status quote and by 2003 it became a 12-year status quo. International support to take out Saddam was crippling as time went on. In retrospect, we probably "should have" pursued regime change in 1991.

Perhaps if we had done nothing to take out Saddam in 2003, today Saddam could have a real WMD - a nuclear weapon. And, we could be looking back to 2003 and saying, we "should have" taken him out then. (In fact, this is the situation we now seem to be in with North Korea and Iran - once they have a WMD, it's makes things more difficult). And if we had taken no action against Saddam, today we'd have a 16-year status quo and perhaps more uncertainty on what to do with him.

Kristol and Kagan are right about the fact that the United States has pretty much always had a "choice" whether or not to go to war. History is made on certain decisions. And whether or not we like the decisions we made in the past - in 1991 or in 2003 - we have to live with them and make decisions today based on history and based on our contemporary circumstances. But, of course, we should always have an eye to the future - for decisions have consequences.