This piece is extremely misleading. Here’s an example:
Kelly’s article reveals a hawkish stance on Iraq which will come as some comfort to Number 10. ‘Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction [WMD],’ he wrote. ‘Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use.’
That just isn’t hawkish. Many people believed that the only way to conclusively stop Iraq’s WMD program was to wage war. I believed this myself. The hard questions were: how serious is the threat? (modest, Kelly believes); how does the threat compare with other current threats, i.e., would a major war be the most prudent measure, given the general strategic threat presented by the global proliferation of nuclear weapons?; would war be justified to deal with a “modest threat”; and so on.
It is the answers to these and other questions that determine whether you were hawkish about the war. If the piece has more evidence of Kelly’s position on these questions, it certainly doesn’t say.
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