Bush's Arguments for War Have Fallen Apart
First, [the war in Iraq] has distracted attention from the original terrorist threat: the al-Qa'ida network that launched the attacks against New York and Washington and yearns to acquire weapons of mass destruction whose use would dwarf the impact of 11 September.
This is not to say that the US has abandoned the hunt for Bin Laden. It is simply to acknowledge a truism that any US administration finds it virtually impossible to focus on two objectives at once. Resources that would have been focused on international terrorism have been switched to Iraq.
Second, the ousting of Saddam can only have hardened the resolve of Iran and North Korea - the two other "axis of evil" members in the sights of Mr Bush - to acquire the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq never possessed. The irony of the invasion was that it removed the least menacing regime of the three.
The White House points to Libya's abandonment of its WMD ambitions as vindication of its Iraq policy. More probably, Colonel Gaddafi's decision reflected a simple calculation that international isolation was no longer in his country's interest. In all likelihood, it would have happened even if Saddam were still in power.
The lesson Tehran and Pyongyang have drawn from the invasion is that the sooner they go nuclear, the safer from US attack they will be. For all its rhetoric, one reason this administration has not gone after Iran and North Korea is because they are stronger, more dangerous opponents than Iraq.
Iran, three times more populous than Iraq, may be within a year or two of building a bomb. North Korea could, according to the CIA, already have half a dozen nuclear devices, holding South Korea to ransom.
The third unintended consequence has been the spread of anti-Americanism across the Islamic world. The toppling of Saddam was supposed to have a domino effect, bringing peace and democracy to the entire Middle East. If anything, the reverse is true. The chaos and violence of Iraq is the least appealing model imaginable. The abuse at Abu Ghraib and the evidence of torture at Guantanamo Bay - for which no senior US soldier or policymaker has been punished - has only made Washington appear more hypocritical than ever, and made thousands of young Muslims even more susceptible to the propaganda of the hardliners.
And, fourthly, there is Iraq itself. This week, Mr Bush pointed to the election as proof that Iraq is changing for the better. Senior intelligence officials - the very ones whose warnings were tossed aside in the rush to war - beg to differ. A couple of weeks ago, America's National Intelligence Council, the research arm of the US intelligence community, warned that Iraq had become "a magnet for international terrorist activity", in the words of its director, Robert Hutchings. The country had become a recruiting ground and training camp for terrorists.
- posted by geoff @ #