President Owes No Apology for War

Amid all the flak over the resignation and testimony of weapons sleuth David Kay and the savage attacks on President Bush’s war decision by the Democratic contenders, the most obvious unasked question is: Why should the president be on the defensive over a war as good as this one?

Casualties were minimal, 25 million people were freed, and a brutal regime was dismantled -- a prison for children was liberated and mass graves stopped being filled. Why should Bush have to apologize for a war that brought Libya’s Moammar Kadafi to heel, made the Syrians and Iranians more pliant and has killed or taken into custody thousands of terrorist soldiers and allies?

The flap over missing weapons of mass destruction is really beside the point because virtually every intelligence agency in the Western world thought the weapons were there, as did the U.N. inspection team. Moreover, Saddam Hussein was given four months to prove he had destroyed the weapons that U.N. inspectors had already established that he possessed. These included thousands of tons of nerve gas, anthrax and other chemical and biological goodies. What became of these? No one knows.

Yet 80% of New Hampshire Democrats voted for candidates who are attacking the president’s decision. This is an ominous portent for the nation’s future. Democrats have been so seduced by their “hate Bush” passions that they will oppose anything he has done. In the process, they have forgotten that Bill Clinton and Al Gore called for regime change in Iraq and got congressional endorsement for that policy. If President Clinton had had the courage -- or was it just focus? -- to invade Iraq, most of the Democrats now attacking the president would have been cheering him on.

Here’s another way of looking at the Democrats’ curious response. What if Clinton, instead of idly standing by and letting a million Tutsis be hacked to death in interethnic feuds, had saved everyone by sending a military force into Rwanda and justified it by saying the Hutus had nuclear weapons? Assuming he did not make the case out of whole cloth but out of faulty intelligence reports, would a single liberal have complained?

The facts are that Clinton and almost every Democrat now whining about the war in Iraq were on record calling for regime change in Iraq and believing that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Sen. John Kerry was privy to the very intelligence reports he now attacks the president for believing.

The argument over the war -- at the time the actual decision was made -- was whether to follow through on a U.N. ultimatum or give Hussein another year to hide whatever he had and to make preparations for more mischief abroad or at home.

And while it may be perfectly reasonable to argue about the justification to go to war, calling the president a deceiver and accusing him of sacrificing Americans for no particular cause is not a reasonable argument. It is a stab in the back of the commander in chief and the nation whose security he is defending. And not only in respect to the president but to all Americans, especially the troops in harm’s way.

Consider what would happen if we got into a confrontation with Syria or Iran or China and the president -- this one or the next -- claimed that the enemy posed an imminent threat? Given the smear campaign of the “antiwar” Democrats, who is going to believe him?

David Horowitz, author of “Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey” (Spence Publications, 2003), is the editor of Frontpagemag .com.