[ OUR OPINION ]
Iraq stability can be
achieved despite errorsONE year after the U.S. launched its attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein, most Iraqis are thankful that the treacherous dictator is behind bars. However, that was not the reason given for going to war, and pronouncements about weapons of mass destruction and links between the Hussein regime and al-Qaida have yet to be verified. Instead, the failure to find such evidence of imminent danger has led to conclusions by many that it does not exist. Still, the United States cannot abandon the venture, however erroneous the motivation might have been.
THE ISSUE
U.S. troops are still in Iraq a year after they toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, and they continue to cope with violence and unrest.
Most world leaders, including those who opposed U.S. intervention in Iraq, believed that Hussein was hiding chemical and biological weapons because he had not accounted for those he had been known to possess years earlier. David A. Kay, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief weapons inspector, attributed the assessment to "wrong" intelligence.
Hans Blix, the former United Nations weapons inspector, went further. In releasing his memoirs on the Iraq inspections, Blix said in an interview with Jim Lehrer of PBS that the intelligence failure was caused by "the same mentality as the witch hunts of past centuries, that we are convinced they exist, and then you are inclined to look at any evidence as proof of that."
Paul O'Neill, fired last year as treasury secretary, has said that White House discussions about a regime change in Iraq began in the first weeks of the Bush administration. Unquestionably, the president and his advisers considered Hussein a threat to peace long before the terrorist attacks on America, and so were prone to consider any evidence of that threat to be conclusive.
"I do not suggest that they were acting in bad faith," Blix told Lehrer. "I have no evidence of that at all. I think they were inclined to think -- as they wanted to think -- that there were weapons of mass destruction, but there was not enough critical thinking on their part. So we got a war that was ... brilliantly planned but the diagnosis was the wrong one."
The refusal by the U.N. Security Council to sanction the military action in Iraq brought into question the legitimacy of the U.S.-led coalition. It has been further eroded by terrorist bombings in Madrid followed by an election that has Spain on the verge of departing the coalition, and remarks by Polish President Aledsander Kwasniewski that his country had been "taken for a ride" by coalition leaders who "deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction."
The United States did not set a reckless precedent by going to war without the Security Council's approval. The Security Council was fairly ignored during the Cold War because of the veto power of the two superpowers. Even after the Cold War, America sent troops to Haiti in 1994 and bombed Iraq in 1998 without the Council's OK, and Europeans did not bother to obtain its approval for going to war in Kosovo in 1999.
That does not mean the United States should ignore concerns about its unilateral behavior. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's prime-minister-elect, has made greater U.N. involvement a condition for his country's continued participation in the coalition beyond the June 30 deadline set by the United States for Iraqi sovereignty. The Bush administration should heed that condition and seek assistance from other longtime European allies that opposed the war a year ago but consider Iraq stability to be a necessity today.
