Big anniversaries call forth big rhetoric. There has certainly been a lot of that to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. More modestly, we offer a short history of Iraqi WMD, the famously nonexistent justification for British participation. The story includes the eccentric claims of the WMD true believers, who have not given up hope of finding a smoking gun in the desert. But even if WMD were now to be discovered, there cannot be many, even among supporters of the war, who would consider it retrospective legitimation for a bungled invasion. Perhaps the best remaining defence of the war is not that what could have been a peaceful liberation was turned into a bloody mess by avoidable mistakes—but rather the opposite, that any removal of Saddam and his Sunni elite, whether from inside or outside Iraq, was bound to mean a violent civil war, and what happened may have been the least bad way of managing it. Opponents of the war have, of course, been making the most noise during the anniversary, and understandably do not consider it necessary to agonise over what might have happened if the troops had pulled back and Saddam had remained in power—the high costs of action have silenced the merely theoretical costs of inaction.
The loudest opponents of the invasion tend to be on the left, yet, awkwardly for them, most of the best arguments against action were conservative: deterrence works, national sovereignty should be sacrosanct, security trumps democracy, we did not know enough to intervene to good effect. One such "realist" critique of the war—by the American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt—was published in Prospect's March 2003 issue, along with an editorial opposing invasion. Three years later Mearsheimer and Walt were at the centre of a storm over their book The Israel Lobby, which examined America's Jewish-dominated Israel lobby and its supposed armlock on US middle east policy. (A piece on this topic by Michael Lind in Prospect in April 2002 almost certainly helped prompt The Atlantic to commission Mearsheimer and Walt to write the article which turned into the book. Ungenerously, The Israel Lobby does not mention Lind's pioneering work.) Our cover story returns to this theme with some good news—in mid-April a new, dovish Israel lobby is to be launched in America to counter the unrepresentative, hawkish views of the existing one. The author of the piece, Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, is no fan of Mearsheimer and Walt—he believes they exaggerate the power of the lobby and do not properly grasp how it works—but like them he believes that a new lobby is a necessary condition of progress to a peace deal, if and when Israelis and Palestinians can sit down for serious negotiations.
