Joe Wilson and the War's Justification

Though you wouldn't know it from media coverage and the hysterics of Kerry and other opponents of the Bush administration, justification for the war in Iraq is steadily being affirmed. Now it's true, the administration's decision to go to war was motivated in part by a belief based on faulty intelligence. With Secretary of State Powell's speech before the UN, this assertion--that Saddam possessed stockpiles of WMDs--was one of the simplest and most oft-cited reasons for military action. The coalition hasn't found any such stockpiles in the last year, belying that claim (though it's worth remembering that absence of evidence doesn't necessarily constitute evidence of absence). Opponents of the Bush administration have had a field day with this apparent error, charging President Bush and his advisers with everything from naïve, bumbling incompetence to malicious deception and outright lying.

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson has been at the center of this flap, charging Bush with lying (in his 2003 State of the Union address) about Saddam Hussein's attempts to acquire uranium from Niger as part of a nuclear-weapons program. Last year, it was revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee, and Wilson charged the White House with leaking her identity in retaliation for his criticism. Now, according to last week's report by the Senate intelligence committee, it's Wilson who has been telling lies. He lied when he said it wasn't his wife's for the CIA to send him to Niger to investigate the supposed uranium deal--she got him the job. He lied, or at least deceived, when he reported Saddam had not sought uranium from Niger--there's ample evidence that the assertion was true, as the British have maintained all along. He was dead wrong when he accused the President of lying in the State of the Union address--"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" was a completely accurate statement. Wilson, it seems, was incompetent partisan who had no business doing the investigating in Niger, and he overlooked or ignored large amounts of evidence which contradicted what he wanted to find. Conveniently, he never wrote a report of his findings. It's not even clear, in fact, that Ms. Plame was a CIA officer working under cover, and that whoever disclosed her identity did anything illegal or improper at all.

Now, let's review the reasons cited by the administration for using military force to remove Saddam from Iraq:

• Saddam has consistently violated multiple UNSC resolutions requiring specific action by Iraq and authorizing all Member States to enforce the resolutions and restore peace and security in the area. He has violated resolutions regarding WMDs, weapons inspections, and no-fly zones. True.
  
• Saddam has produced and used WMDs in the past, even against his own people. True.
  
• Saddam currently maintains stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. False.
  
• Saddam has failed to comply with the UN's requirement that he prove he's destroyed his WMDs and dismantled WMD production. He has consistently interfered with UN inspectors' attempts to verify compliance. True.
  
• Saddam has sought and/or is seeking a nuclear weapons program. True.
  
• Saddam has committed innumerable acts of oppression against the Iraqi people, including oppression of women, torture, execution of dissidents and political opponents, and denying basic human rights and freedoms. True.
  
• Saddam and his regime have consistently supported international terrorism throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. There is evidence of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Saddam publicly approved of the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Qaeda against the United States. True.
  

The list goes on. The point here is that only one one of the several reasons offered for the war have been shown to be false. That mistake was a significant one, and President Bush will be associated with it for a long time, but it was a genuine mistake, not a deception. That Saddam didn't have stockpiles of WMDs doesn't change the fact that he was an enemy of the US and a credible threat to its security. Nor does it change the fact that he was a tyrant, a butcher, a perpetrator of atrocities, and a threat to the stability of the entire region. These were the reasons that the US set out to remove him, and they've largely been validated.

Now that the war is over, the question whether the war was justified is somewhat moot. The US has committed to building a secure, prosperous, free Iraq, and we must see the task through to the end. Some realists, non-interventionists, and just war proponents may have felt that the threat posed by Iraq and the nation-building cause weren't enough to justify the war. Maybe they're right. I don't, as a rule, agree with nation-building, and I'm still not sure whether the threat was direct enough to justify invasion (because I don't know where that line is). The time for that debate is gone now. A free and prosperous Iraq is a good goal, and anything less than the fiercest pursuit of that goal would be a moral failure and likely fatal to freedom and security in the Middle East and therefore the rest of the world.

More on this:
Senate Intelligence Committee Report
The White House's Reasons for the War
A Decade of Defiance
Cliff May on Joe Wilson
Bill Buckley: Should We Have Gone To War?

Review: King Arthur

What do you get when you take a legend, a myth, a magical tale--and remove most of the elements that make it mythical? You end up with a story that fails to sparkle, a historical account that isn't. It's pretty well impossible to separate man from myth in the legend of King Arthur, as the new Antoine Fuqua movie shows.

The plot premise is somewhat interesting, and might have made a decent movie if the protagonist weren't supposed to be Arthur. In this account, he's a native Briton raised as a Roman, leading a band of knights from Sarmatia who are indentured to Rome. Arthur (Clive Owen), through a series of events, becomes disillusioned with the Church and Roman Empire which is pulling out of Britain. He joins the native pagans led by Guinevere (Kiera Knightley) and Merlin (Stephen Dillane) in fighting off the invading Saxon hordes, and in the process several of his knights and beloved friends are killed.

The film suffers from acting that's mediocre, at best. Owen may be good behind the wheel of a BMW, but he's rather wooden when faced with a substantive role. Even this might not be a fatal flaw, though, if it weren't for the paucity of dialogue. Battle scenes are nice, but they can't carry a movie. And Owen isn't nearly a good enough actor to carry a man-of-few-words part off. The lack of dialogue also prevents the relationship between Arthur and his knights from developing as it should. Thus, we don't feel the emotional impact when Arthur and the men part ways, or when Lancelot and others are killed in the final battle.

The romance element of the story doesn't feel right, either. The Lancelot-Guinevere affair, which adds so much tension and tragedy to traditional Arthurian accounts, is reduced to a few lingering exchanges between them. The fact that Arthur and Guinevere aren't married until the end, after Lancelot is dead, doesn't help matters.

In the quest to create a "historical" Arthur, the creators have cut out most of what makes the story so endearing--and so enduring. We don't get a sense that this man was of such stature that he could inspire a legend spanning 15 centuries. All in all, the film is just a mediocre piece of historical fiction that claims the name of the king to get recognition and pull in viewers.

I give it a 4 out of 10.