Weapons of mass distortion

To certain critics of U.S. policy in Iraq, the only thing worse than going to war with Saddam Hussein is the fact that we won. This they can never forgive -- which is why they are now trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction.

For these opponents of war, it isn't enough that a tyrant and his psychopath sons have been deposed. It doesn't count that mass graves have been uncovered, that torture chambers have been exposed, or that Saddam's victims can speak freely for the first time in 30 years. The critics are now claiming the war was illegitimate because no one has yet found a pile of anthrax in downtown Baghdad.

These rather selective moralists are leaping on a distorted report about comments by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on WMD. An advance press release from Vanity Fair magazine spun as news the fact that Mr. Wolfowitz had said the following during an interview in early May: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason." In Europe this has been seized on by the antiwar left as a source of vindication. "Just Complete and Utter Lies," explained the Daily Express of London. Germany's allegedly more august Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed: "The charge of deception is inescapable." State-side, meanwhile, the critics are focusing on whether there was an "intelligence failure," or the political manipulation of intelligence, in concluding that Saddam had WMD.

But who's trying to deceive whom here? That Saddam had biological or chemical weapons was a probability that everyone assumed to be true, even those who were against the war. U.N. inspections in the 1990s had proved that Iraq had such weapons, including 30,000 liters of anthrax, and Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraq's own Kurds. The French themselves insisted that disarming Saddam of WMD, as opposed to deposing him, had to be the core of U.N. Resolution 1441.

Only last week Democratic Sen. Joe Biden was asked by MSNBC's Chris Matthews, "Do you believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction going into the war?" Mr. Biden's reply: "Yes, I do." Were he and other Democrats also part of the vast WMD conspiracy?

Mr. Wolfowitz's words were no contradiction of anything the U.S. said before the war. The allies had always given multiple reasons for ridding the world of Saddam. British Prime Minister Tony Blair famously used the human rights rationale in a major and well-received speech in Glasgow in March.

The Vanity Fair press release also failed to include that immediately after his WMD remarks, Mr. Wolfowitz had added in the interview: "But there have always been three fundamental concerns: One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism and the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." What seems to be going on here is an attempt to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters. If their backing for the war is morally vindicated, they will emerge as even larger forces on the world stage, and so they must be tarnished after the fact as dissemblers.

Within the United States, the role of the French and the European left is being played by elements of the intelligence community. Parts of the CIA in particular like to think of themselves as Olympian analysts whose views should be accepted as gospel. They resent that Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon sometimes challenges holy CIA writ, which has often been wrong about Iraq. In any case, intelligence isn't dogma but is supposed to be merely one tool for elected policy makers, all the more so given the sometimes murky nature of the information.

As to the undiscovered WMD, Iraq is larger than Germany and much of it remains unsearched. As Mr. Bush noted in Poland this weekend, the U.S. has already found two of the mobile biological labs that Colin Powell fingered before the war. Yesterday Mr. Blair added that he's seen more evidence that he will soon make public. But it is also possible that Saddam destroyed much of it, or that some was taken out of the country.

Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory. The allies liberated a country of 22 million people, rid the world of a terrorist ally and have begun a process that may well create a more stable and prosperous Arab world. The credibility gap lies with those who were opposed to achieving all of that. -- The Wall Street Journal