The dialogue about the war in Iraq drags on (hey, at least we have a dialogue, pity it couldn't happen before the war....), and both sides seem stuck in at least one bad habit. Both the defenders (Bush and Christopher Hitchens) and the attackers (everybody else) focus single-mindedly on Iraq. Iraq didn't have WMD? Game over. Iraq was viewed as a threat by the entire world? Done deal.
My problem (the one I'm willing to discuss with you) is that this isn't the way foreign policy decisions are, or should be, made. You don't focus on one country, ask whether it's a credible threat, and boom! There's a whole world out there, one that we're repeatedly told is dangerous, and anybody can be a threat--Canada could send down too many comedians, just to take one example. The question I never hear asked, or answered, is how did pre-war Iraq compare, in the administration's own assessment, to other threats on the table: bigger or smaller threat than North Korea, which already was known to have nukes (and to have warred with its "neighbor", South Korea), or Iran, or Pakistan?
The latter is an interesting case. Given the administration's own criteria for a threat deserving immediate action, only one nation actually fulfills all of them. Pakistan had frequently warred with its neighbor, India, over Kashmir. Pakistan had not only made its way into the nuclear club, and earned sanctions
for its testing, but, as we now know, the father of its nuclear bomb, A.Q. Khan, was the world's chief proliferator of nuclear materials and techniques, vastly enriching the potential of Iran and North Korea (his punishment: house arrest in a situation where the US has been unable to question him).
The final criterion: aiding or harboring terrorists. Pakistan's version of the CIA, the ISI, has been deeply implicated in support of the Taliban, and just this weekend the Telegraph reported that Mullah Omar brokered the truce between Pakistan and resurgent Taliban remnants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
So, here's the question nobody seems to ask: why did Pakistan, 3 for 3 on the "we'll get you" list, become a friend and not an actionable threat? Do the supporters of the Iraq war really think Iraq was a greater menace to peace and stability in 2001 than Pakistan--which needed to be threatened with bombing back to the Stone Age to become an ally in the post-9/11 war on the Taliban? If so, I'd like to see the reasons why.