Ten days into a war fought under the flag of disarmament,
U.S.-led troops have found no substantial sign of Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction… “All the searches have turned up negative,”
said a Joint Staff officer who is following field reports. “The
munitions that have been found have all been conventional.”…”The
president has made very clear that the reason why we are in Iraq is
to find weapons of mass destruction,” [Assistant Secretary of State
for Nonproliferation John S.] Wolf said in a telephone interview
yesterday. He added, “The fact that we haven’t found them in seven
or eight days doesn’t faze me one little bit. Very clearly, we need
to find this stuff or people are going to be asking
questions.”
— Barton Gellman, in the Washington Post of March 30,
2003
Questions, eh? What kind of questions? Like maybe, why did we go to
war in the first place? Yet even those opposed to the war rarely
attempted to argue that there were no weapons of mass destruction
— only that Saddam would not use them, or would not use them on
us. Does this entitle them to say “I told you so”? More seriously,
if the coalition forces don’t find any weapons of mass destruction,
does this mean that the war was mistaken and that those who
sacrificed so much, including those who made the supreme sacrifice,
did it all if not for nothing at least unnecessarily?
These are hard questions. Of course there can hardly be any
doubt that the end of the barbarous Hussein regime is a good in
itself and a boon to humanity — especially to the Iraqis
themselves, many of whom chose to die in defense of it. Yet it
would never have come about if only Hussein himself had been open
and forthcoming about his weapons of mass destruction. Why would he
not have been more honest and open with the inspectors in order to
save his regime? Is he, like some liars, so accustomed to lying
that he can’t tell the truth to save his life?
I don’t think this is the answer. We may yet find the nerve
gases and the anthrax that President Bush promised us were there,
but even if we do, I believe that it is not improbable that Saddam
Hussein would have refused to give them up even if he hadn’t had
any. The point isn’t that he wanted these weapons for their own
sake, either to use or to threaten to use. He just couldn’t be seen
to accede to the demands, still less to the threats, of an outside
power. This is because of the way an honor culture works. To see
what I mean, consider Saddam’s behavior in his interview with Dan
Rather.
There, you may remember, Saddam pointedly denied that he had the
al-Samoud missiles, or that, if he had them, he would destroy them.
Yet he did have them and was already on the point of destroying
them! How can we make sense of this, which sounds to us in the West
like reverse hypocrisy: pretending to be more bad and intransigent
than you really are. But to Saddam, admitting that he (a) had the
missiles and (b) was willing to destroy them, even though this was
in fact the case, would have made him look weak and craven on both
points. And looking strong is all that he, like most of those
brought up according to Arab and Muslim ideas of honor, really
cares about — more even than the continuation of his rule or,
indeed, life itself.
About these things he cared enough at least to destroy the
missiles — but not enough to say that he was going to
destroy them. In the same way, Iraqi troops may, like any other
troops, fear death so much that they run away or fight poorly, but
it is probably true to say that they would rather die than
admit to any such fears or behavior. That is why the Iraqi
leadership continues on with its bombast about how “We shall turn
the desert into a big graveyard for American and British troops”
even when it is patently obvious to everyone that their troops are
the ones being slaughtered. The point is not to convey accurate
information about the world but to make the gesture that is
expected of a brave and honorable man.
For the same reason, it is always wise to treat with a certain
skepticism all those reports in the media about the hostility of
“the Arab street.” I don’t doubt for a moment that such hostility
really exists, or that it may at some times break out into violence
against Americans or Britons. But one simply can’t rely on a direct
correspondence between what people say to an interviewer and their
real feelings, let alone their real intentions. Being angry and
hostile against America and Britain for attacking their Muslim
brothers in Iraq is the response that their honor culture demands
of them, and they duly give it when asked. The reality is going to
be harder to figure out, but will probably be more to our
liking.
