Why the Left Should Concede that Iraq Had WMDs

The right-of-Bush news site WorldNetDaily is claiming that a recent, private, intelligence summit was targeted by members of the U.S. intelligence community, trying to quiet or discredit news emerging from the summit that Iraq was, in fact, working on WMDs and trying to conceal those programs from U.N. inspectors. The idea, of course, is to rehabilitate George Bush's initial, and most effective, rationale for the war in Iraq -- especially now that support is crumbling from the very pillars of the right. We should let them do so, and help them.

Thanks to the war, Iraq's lack of WMDs can never be positively proven. And yet, for some reason, Bush has jumped onto the no-WMDs bandwagon. Why would have done that, when there way to prove him wrong? Perhaps because his advisors realized that continuing to claim that Iraq had WMDs is a political time bomb that he had to ditch as soon as possible. The left should put it back in his hands, by not only conceding the right's claim that Iraq had WMDs, but shouting it from the rooftops. Here's why.

Prior to now, the left's opposition to the war has, sensibly, centered around the notion that Iraq did not have WMDs and, therefore, President Bush was wrong to wage war with Iraq. The obvious instinctive sense of this argument has pushed President Bush to change (time and again) his war rationale -- ending up lately with the toughest-to-disprove, unrefutable-in-the-short-term argument that the war will, eventually, allow some form of democracy to take root and that, eventually, that democracy will provide for stability which will, eventually, make it tougher for terrorists to operate in Iraq.

There are several advantages to arguing that Iraq had WMDs. One, it protects the left's credibility in the event some shred of evidence turns the tide on public opinion. Two, it reminds people that Bush's rationales have shifted on the war. But, most importantly, it forces people to confront a brand new, and starkly terrifying reason why Bush's war was not only a failure, but proof that he and the Republicans are not only inept at anything but talking about national security, they're actually detrimental to it.

Remember, the war was justified as an attempt not just to deny Saddam the possibility of using WMDs, but to keep those WMDs out of the hands of terrorists. It would be bad enough if the war failed to do so, but what if the war were the very thing that made it possible for terrorists to acquire WMDs? George Bush would have helped the terrorists more directly and undeniably than all the journalists and dissenting Democrats of the last four years combined.

So, in the campaigns for Congress this year, Democratic candidates should stake out very clear ground declaring the war a failure. When Republicans call them on "declaring defeat," Democrats should simply respond that the goal of the war in Iraq was not to triumph over insurgents, but to stop terrorists from getting WMDs. If Bush was wrong and there were none, the war was a failure from the beginning. If Bush was right and there were WMDs, the war itself made it possible for terrorists to get them. And they should quote this concession of the fact that the United States government can not assure us the weapons did not fall into the hands of America's enemies:

They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country.

That was George W. Bush talking -- admitting, though the mainstream media failed to notice it, that the war may have led to the weapons making their way into some other country, into the hands (since we haven't heard about it) of an enemy. As more time passes, the less likely is the scenario that the weapons were hidden. So let's start conceding the right's point -- Iraq had WMDs. They're gone now. Our enemies have them. And that's George Bush's fault.