The real weapons of mass destruction are the enemies we made among the way

It is, I suppose, not surprising to see Bret “Usually Wrong And Never in Doubt” Stephens proclaim that he was correct to have supported the invasion of Iraq. It is amazing to see him justify it in originalist terms — that is, because of weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist:

Another weak argument is that Iraq under Hussein wasn’t a serious geopolitical threat, no matter how badly his forces were damaged in 1991. This ignores the horrors of the Iran-Iraq war, the rape of Kuwait, the Persian Gulf war, the Scud missile attacks on Israel and the Kurdish refugee crisis, to say nothing of his genocidal assaults on his own people. Hussein also repeatedly made real bids to acquire nuclear weapons, which were stopped only by an Israeli military strike in 1981 and by U.S. attacks and U.N. inspections during and after the Persian Gulf war. In 1998 the Clinton administration launched four days of strikes against Iraq, with the explicit intention of degrading Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

But if there was one indisputably real W.M.D. in Iraq, it was Hussein himself. Until his downfall, he put everyone and everything he encountered at risk.

Sure, he did not actually possess anything that fell under the uselessly broad category of “weapons of mass destruction” — let alone nuclear weapons — but have you ever considered that he was the weapon of mass destruction? CHECKMATE LIBS!

As for the human lives destroyed and the fiscal and opportunity costs — look, a faculty member put a trigger warning on his syllabus again.