Like pretty much everyone else in Washington, I have no idea what charges Patrick Fitzgerald is planning to bring in the Valerie Plame case, nor do I know who he might charge, or what evidence he has. But I sure am eager to find out. I also hope that whatever he does might refocus public attention on one basic fact that seems to have slipped out of view: We invaded Iraq because this was supposedly the best way to deal with that country's nuclear program, which was, allegedly, highly advanced.
Consider what we know to be certain: In his 2003 State of the Union address, George W. Bush told the country that Saddam Hussein had tried to get some uranium from Africa. On the face of things, the fact that someone has tried to get uranium from Africa is not a good reason to launch a war. With uranium, though, you can build a nuclear bomb. Actually, you can't, but you could if you had an advanced nuclear weapons research program to go with your uranium. Hussein, Bush was telling us, had just such a program, as evidenced by his habit of seeking uranium. This program would -- or so we were told -- soon result in a nuclear bomb. Various bad things were going to follow from this. As Bush put it:
Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
In other words, Hussein not only was going to have a bomb soon, but he was going to use the bomb to attack the United States of America, possibly by giving it to al-Qaeda. This was the reason we went to war. Joe Wilson thought the president was lying when he said this stuff about the uranium from Africa, and he said so. We now know that the White House thought these allegations were a big deal, potentially very damaging to its case for war, and decided to do something about it. We now know that in the process word got out that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an "operative" for the Central Intelligence Agency. What crimes may have been involved here will have to wait for Fitzgerald. This was universally considered a big deal at the time. The New York Times took it seriously by running Wilson's op-ed, and the White House took it seriously by trying to discredit Wilson and dispute his facts.
Whether the uranium story was true is an important aspect, not just as a political question ("is Bush a liar?") but as a policy question: Should we go to war? The war was about nuclear weapons and uranium related to nuclear weapons -- and so important things hinged on the uranium.
For the past couple of years, the press and the political system have gone into a remarkable amount of denial about this. At some point, Bush changed his mind and decided we went to war in order to build a pluralistic democracy in Iraq. And in light of the WMD realities on the ground, you can see why he did it. Bizarrely, however, huge numbers of other people, including liberal pundits, analysts, and members of Congress, have gone along with this switcheroo. Uranium -- what uranium? Nukes -- what nukes? It's the democracy, stupid. And if you don't think that was a good reason to go to war, and if you don't think it's a good reason to continue a war that almost everyone acknowledges hasn't been going well, then you must be a pacifist or one of those insidious realists who thinks it's wrong to use American power to do good in the world.
That's all silly. Bush never would have gone on and on about the alleged nuclear program unless he had a reason of some sort for doing so. And of course he had a reason. If he'd stood on the floor of the House and said "Iraq poses no threat to the United States and will pose no such threat for the foreseeable future, but we should invade anyway to make it a democracy," people would have laughed at him. No president has ever said or done anything remotely like that, and with good reason -- it's an insane way to behave. Countries don't do that because nobody knows how to make it work. That's not to say it's impossible, but nobody knows how. There are no reliable methods at hand and no way of knowing what will happen when you try.
Still, reasonable prospects of success have long been considered one of the criteria for a just war. This is a principle of both prudence and morality, and we live by it for good reason. War is a nasty thing, even with precision munitions. Lots of people die. There are things worth dying for, and things worth killing for, but to go to war voluntarily with no idea of how to achieve your goals would be the height of irresponsibility. Destroying a nuclear weapons program is the sort of thing we know how to do. If it really were the case that some country was building a nuclear bomb they planned to detonate in an American city, that would be a perfectly good reason for going to war. And if we went to war, it would be nice, of course, to try and make the post-war government as good as possible. But nobody would be surprised if stitching a stable liberal democracy together out of various disparate ethnic and sectarian groups proved impossible. If things weren't working out, we would just leave, having achieved what we set out to do.
That the nukes we went in to eliminate did not, in fact, exist is scandal of monumental proportions. It's not a reason to start pretending that the Army can do the impossible if only we keep it deployed abroad long enough.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
