According to Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times, “there were actually four reasons for this [Iraq] war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.” That is an insightful way of looking at the justifications for the war. The Real Reason: the US needed to hit someone in the Arab world and Afghanistan wasn’t enough of a target to demonstrate our overwhelming power. The Right Reason: Because the US needed to partner with Iraqis to build a progressive Arab state. The Moral Reason: Because Saddam Hussein was a brutal, oppressive murderer. The Stated Reason: Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to terrorism. Friedman states that failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is irrelevant because “It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.”

But if this is the case, why are the media criticizing the failure to find weapons of mass destruction? What is undermining Bush and Blair’s credibility is not belief in the necessity of the war. Even now, as much as 75% of the US populace think the war was a good thing. What undermines credibility is the disconnect between why the war is now seen as a positive thing versus the bill of goods we were sold before the war. If there were good Moral and Right reasons for the war, why did the US focus so much on Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Donald Rumsfeld has now said that evidence of chemical or biological weapons might have been destroyed before the war. If this is the case, why did our intelligence not know that before the war started and why did the US not wait a few days for a report that the Iraqis had destroyed the weapons? Others have said that we will still find the weapons, but it will take some time. If time was needed, then why the rush to war? Why did the US not give UNMOVIC a couple of extra months to search for the weapons if they are now willing to give the US Army a couple of extra months?

The simple answer is that weapons of mass destruction were not the reason for war, only a justification. The reason that weapons of mass destruction became a focus lies in international law and US and UK domestic politics. It appears that the Bush administration had made a decision to go to war and the American and British people wanted a legal basis for war as represented by a UN resolution in support. But international law in the UN Security Council does not deal in what is moral or right, only in balances of power. The US focused on weapons of mass destruction because that was the only basis the UN had for issuing a resolution in support of the war. In the end, the UN did not pass a resolution and the US and UK went to war without a legal basis. Lack of a legal basis did not stop the war because the US and UK did not go to war for legal reasons and it did not go to war to find weapons of mass destruction.

A more popular route to getting international approval for the war would have been to focus on the moral reasons. If the Bush administration had focussed on Saddam Hussein’s brutality and made a case for war for moral reasons, then hearings in Congress and Parliament would probably not be taking place. If Colin Powell had gone to the UN with evidence of mass graves, torture, summary executions, then failure to find weapons of mass destruction would not be an issue. But if the US brought up issues of human rights in Iraq, it would have been open to charges of supporting other regimes in the world that do the same thing, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Besides, the UN would probably not have issued a resolution to support the war on this basis. The Bush administration thought it had a better chance of getting the legal support it wanted on the basis of weapons of mass destruction.

It may be true that weapons of mass destruction was not the real reason for going to war, especially now that the war is a fait accompli. However, the fact that none have been found raises issues of abuse of power. There are hearings going on in the US Congress and the British Parliament now not because Democrats, Laborites, and moderate Republicans think that the war was a bad idea and want to discredit the reasons for it after the fact. Rather, they are upset that the President and Prime Minister may have lied to the American and British peoples by overstating the danger of the weapons of mass destruction.

The focus of these hearings are news reports that “a small group of Defense Department officials -- working outside of normal intelligence circles -- were directed in 2001 to find evidence of connections between Iraq and al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction." Such pressure flies in the face of the purpose of intelligence gathering, which is to discover objective facts. Those facts are then turned over to policy makers in order to have good information with which to formulate policy. By forcing the facts to conform to the policy goal undermines the intelligence gathering process as well as the democratic process of policy making.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is not really an issue of whether or not we should have gone to war in Iraq. It is an issue now in the US and Britain because the American and British people don’t like to be lied to and this is how it is increasingly appearing to us.