Iraq and the Gulf of Tonkin

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The dust is not about to settle over the intelligence failure in Iraq. But it has already blurred our vision about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

There is still time to remind ourselves WMDs were not the principal reason for going to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq; they were the pretext. And that's why irrefutable evidence was not the standard. Axis of evil regime change was the lodestar.

When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 that war was no longer a question of "if" but "when," the casus belli had little to do with WMDs. The Bush administration, they explained, starkly and simply, had decided to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emption had become the vehicle for driving axis of evil practitioners out of power.

President Bush made clear Sunday the U.S. was justified in toppling Saddam irrespective of elusive WMDs.

The liberation of Iraq, in the neocon scenario, would be followed by a democratic Iraq that would quickly recognize Israel. This, in turn, would "snowball" -- the analogy only works in the Cedar Mountains of Lebanon -- through the region, bringing democracy from Syria to Egypt and to the sheikhdoms, emirates and monarchies of the Gulf.

All these new democracies would then embrace Israel and hitch their backward economies to the Jewish state's advanced technology. And Israel could at long last lower its guard and look forward to a generation of peace. That was the vision.

WMDs were weapons of mass deception that became the pretext for the grand design. As was a much ballyhooed, and later discredited, park bench meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the September 11, 2001, Saudi kamikaze.

The amateur strategists in the neo-con camp knew a lot more about Israel and its need for peace than they did about the law of unintended consequences, writ large in Iraq, and in the Arab world beyond.

The neocons were not alone in misreading the state of play in Saddam's Baghdad. The dictator was so detached from reality that he was writing heartthrob romance novels and sending them to Deputy Premier Tariq Aziz, the only sophisticated literary person in his entourage, for editorial comment.