EDITORIAL: Iraq war was wrong

asahi.com?EDITORIAL: Iraq war was wrong?-?ENGLISH: "EDITORIAL: Iraq war was wrong

12/17/2005

Speaking about the war in Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush admitted Wednesday, 'It is true that much of the intelligence (on which his administration invaded Iraq) turned out to be wrong.' How did the people of Iraq feel when they heard this?

Washington's principal justification for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. But it became gradually clear that this was not true. Finally, Bush himself acknowledged this on Wednesday.

If the United States invaded Iraq based on false intelligence, the attack itself was wrong, and Bush should admit this. In the war that began on a false premise, at least 30,000 Iraqi civilians are believed to have been killed, and more than 2,000 U.S. troops have died.

'As president, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq,' Bush said. But in what we can only describe as a display of misguided defiance, he quickly defended his action: 'Saddam was a threat--and the American people and the world is better off because he is no longer in power.'

Let us recall what Bush said in his ultimatum just before the invasion.

He stated there was no question that Iraq was hiding WMD, and that Saddam had to be disarmed immediately for the safety of the world.

As legal grounds for justifying these claims, Bush argued that Baghdad refused to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding that Iraq submit to WMD inspections. Iraq's denials of WMD possession were ignored.

At the time, we insisted on placing the foremost priority on U.N. inspections, and opposed the invasion of Iraq because, in the absence of evidence that Iraq's weapons posed a clear threat, a pre-emptive strike would violate international law.

Given how the war has since turned out, it is clear that Bush's strategy of rushing into a pre-emptive strike was a flop.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who supported the war, must feel like the ground has crumbled under his feet. Koizumi said at the start of the war: 'Just imagine the danger of WMD falling into the hands of a dangerous dictator. Japan can't sit back and say this is someone else's business.'

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe noted Thursday: 'Given the fact that Iraq had used WMD in the past, Washington had good reason to conclude that the Iraqis were in possession of those weapons. And it was only reasonable that Japan should decide to support the United States.'

But since Washington's premise was wrong, there is no changing the fact that Tokyo had erred in its decision, no matter how hard Koizumi and others may try to rationalize it. Germany and France insisted on thorough weapons inspections and opposed the invasion. Their argument was far more reasonable.

Iraq has just held parliamentary elections, and the political process of national reconstruction has advanced one step. Democracy is obviously more desirable than a dictatorship, but that does not justify any forcible change by an external power.

Including Japan, all nations that have supported or participated in the Iraq war ought to admit their mistakes now. Only then will it become possible to reorganize the framework of global cooperation with Iraq's reconstruction.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 16(IHT/Asahi: December 17,2005)"