Correspondence: Selling the Market Short? The Marketplace of Ideas and the Iraq War

To the Editors:

Chaim Kaufmann's recent article on the selling of the Iraq war makes a valuable contribution both to the debate over the origins of that war and to scholarship on threat inflation.¹ I agree with much of his argument: George W. Bush's administration misled the public on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability; its control over information helped skew the public debate; and the media were insufficiently critical of its claims. I take issue, however, with Kaufmann's contention that the White House enjoys unparalleled authority in foreign policy matters and that this mainly accounts for the administration's success. In contrast, I suggest an alternative explanation rooted in the transformative impact of the September 11 attacks on political contest in the United States.

Overstating the Market Failure

Kaufmann's case hinges on establishing that the administration's claims went "beyond the range of ambiguity that disinterested experts would credit as plausible" (p.8).² That criterion seems to have been met in the Bush team's allegations of an operational relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq, in its insinuations that the latter bore some responsibility for the September 11 attacks, and in its charges that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear weapons components.

On other counts, however, Kaufmann is less persuasive. Before the U.S. invasion, many observers outside the administration suspected or believed that Iraq had active WMD programs and chemical or biological weapons stocks. Among them were both the "dispassionate" (e.g., Hans Blix, then the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission [UNMOVIC]) and the "passionate" but opposed (e.g., nations such as France and Germany that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had disparaged as "old Europe"). In January 2003, before the UN Security Council, Blix hailed Iraqi cooperation, but he observed that Iraq's December 2002 weapons declaration had failed to put to rest long-standing questions. Echoing the Bush administration's logic, Blix cautioned that "inspectors can[not] close a file by simply invoking a precept that Iraq cannot prove the negative. In such cases, regrettably, they must conclude... that the absence of the particular item is not assured."³ He recapitulated this analysis at the end of the month and then again in February. As the United States ratcheted up the pressure, Blix sought to rein in the dogs of war: he praised Iraq's progress and criticized U.S. intelligence. Nevertheless, as late as March 7, 2003, Blix noted that Iraq's cooperative gestures "must be soberly judged by how many question marks they actually succeed in straightening out. This is not yet clear."⁴

Although French and German politicians opposed the war, their countries' intelligence agencies reached similar conclusions about the state of Iraq's WMD programs.⁵ In February 2001 German intelligence officials reported that Iraq had recently accelerated its chemical weapons program and its acquisition of biological weapons components. With regard to nuclear weapons, their conclusion—that Iraq would, if unobstructed, be capable of production within three to five years—was even more pessimistic than British and U.S. estimates.⁶ The International Institute for Strategic Studies was skeptical of Iraq's nuclear capacity in the absence of external assistance, but it strongly suspected that Iraq had retained significant biological and chemical agent and certainly had the capacity to produce weapons in short order.⁷ Kenneth Pollack thus rightly concludes that "when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface."⁸

If the marketplace of ideas failed to weed out the Bush administration's unfounded claims, the latter's machinations cannot bear all the blame. Hussein's evasions played...