Fareed Zakaria makes the same point I've been making: ""We were all wrong," says weapons inspector David Kay. Actually, no. There was one group whose prewar estimates of Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities have turned out to be devastatingly close to reality—the U.N. inspectors."
It bears repeating again and again how devastating this is for the entire hawkish critique of multilateral arms control. The hawks routinely dismissed and disparaged the UN inspectors for underestimating the Iraqi threat. The urgency of war, and the doctrine of pre-emption, rested entirely on the presumptive Iraqi WMD threat. The hawk critique was two-fold: inspections could not discover the truth, and inspections could not provide security. Both have now been proven false. The inspectors got Iraq's WMD almost exactly right, and at the time the US went to war Iraq posed no threat to American security.
This doesn't mean that the multilateral alternative is perfect. Members of the inspections teams were always frustrated with Iraqi behavior, and few felt that they could be absolutely certain of their findings. Since it is impossible to really prove a negative finding, given ill intentions multilateral arms control can't achieve 100% certainty. It might be rational under certain conditions to conclude that less than 100% is intolerable (although if a similar standard was used to judge National Missile Defense, that program would be killed in less than a heartbeat.) I didn't think Iraq was such a situation, given the preponderance of evidence. The hawks did. They were wrong, as we now know.
What makes this more than a one-off failure, though, is that looking back at a long history of these debates, the hawks have almost always been wrong. It isn't just the absurd exaggeration of the Soviet threat in the late 1970s. Remember the Cox report hyping the China threat, warning of Chinese theft of nuclear secrets and an impending, unavoidable conflict with a rising great power challenger? No? Funny about that.
To be clear: real threats do exist. Those threats sometimes require firm responses, military if appropriate. The problem with the hawks is that the threats they choose to emphasize regularly turn out to have not really been threats - or worse, as the political scientist Robert Jervis long ago observed, their harsh and threatening rhetoric creates a self-fulfilling prophechy as the demonized target really does begin a military buildup out of fear of a counterpart which has turned bellicose for no evident reason. Meanwhile, "security" spending skyrockets without achieving any real increase in security, and real threats go unaddressed as attention fixates on the false threats hyped by the hawks.
If the hawk argument were a scientific theory, it would almost certainly have to be discarded as proven false. But for the hawks, security is politics, and nothing is ever allowed to shake their faith. Again and again, the hawks exaggerate threats for political reasons, dismissing contrary evidence and attacking their rivals for not being serious about security. When you look at their record, though, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that it is the hawks that just aren't serious about security.
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