We need to settle this
9 o'clock, April 26, 2003
Courtesy of Rob, an article — I should say a disturbing article, but I guess I’m just resigned to this sort of thing — from ABC News:
To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy. ...
(We’ve shown the power. I’m still not sure how we’re going to go about showing the democracy. But anyway —)
If weapons of mass destruction were not the primary reason for war, what was? Here’s the answer officials and advisers gave ABCNEWS.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed everything, including the Bush administration's thinking about the Middle East — and not just Saddam Hussein. ...
[T]he Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.
Officials said that even if Saddam had backed down and avoided war by admitting to having weapons of mass destruction, the world would have received the same message: Don't mess with the United States.
As Rob points out, this undoubtedly needs to be taken with at least one grain of salt. Whether it’s; true or not isn’t something I’m particularly interested in. I mean, I am interested, obviously, but the only way we’ll ever find out is if someone turns up hard physical evidence one way or the other. In the absence of that, I just can’t work up much enthusiasm for the argument.
What I think is significantly more interesting is that plenty of Americans would probably be totally OK with this.
And that — not the meaning of international law, or the role of the UN in world affairs, or the level of threat posed by WMDs Iraq may or may not have had — is the argument we, as a country, need to be having. We need to stop sweeping our differences under the rug and talking past each other and having our politicians say one thing to one consistituency and one thing to another. We need to publicly, and forthrightly, decide what kind of country we’re going to be.
And while I’m at it, of course I’d like a pony.
I'm not sure I agree entirely. I think the PNAC crowd has been perfectly forthright about their aims and intentions, and anybody who has been following the debate closely ought to be aware of those aims.
On the other hand, if you're talking about what the politicians are saying, and what is being heard by those who aren't following the debate closesly, you may have a point. But it's unclear then, too, as you can't reasonably ascribe a single motive to the entire administration.
Which creates an interesting bureaucratic-historical problem. The Iran-Contra defendants claimed, in essence, that they were running their own foreign policy and not telling the President or even the entirety of the cabinet. If, as the ABC news report alleged, information was falsified, it is entirely possible that such information was falsified by medium-level functionaries and passed up, and that the administration made its decisions based upon bad information. This is even more likely if the administration is the sort of environment where bad news, or news that contradicts expectations, is not well rewarded (and certainly there have been indications that that might be the case).
So maybe it's not so much that the administration is trying to pull the wool over the country's eyes as it is that medium-level functionaries are pulling the wool over the administration's eyes.