A rchive Date
[ 04-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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Agonizing over Iraq
By JOHN DOWNING -- Toronto Sun
February 4, 2004
The WMD debate grinds on in trench warfare. Any lull is exploded by another tragedy in Iraq to remind us the U.S. won the war brilliantly but is losing the peace miserably, or by insiders admitting, like last week, that in intelligence, "We were all wrong, probably."
The initials that stand for Weapons of Mass Destruction are now seared into history. So is the agonizing over whether Iraq had any, other than the one called Saddam Hussein found cowering in a hole, or whether the initials also stand for George W. Bush and Tony Blair as Wielders of Mass Deception.
It was The Economist last October which put that clever spin on those deadly initials.
Yet those who malevolently argue that hysterical exaggeration about WMD was just a lie to justify war ignore that each week brings us evidence that didn't happen. But then, anti-war zealots also dismiss the fact the world became a safer place as a result.
The deception conspiracy theory has unraveled. A judge has cleared Blair from the charge the British PM "sexed up" information on Iraq's capabilities. And David Kay, the former U.S. chief weapons inspector, is hardly a White House favourite in his TV rounds, but he does insulate it from accusations it manipulated information, even as he utters that now-famous quote blaming the quality of the intelligence.
Those who hate Bush won't be satisfied, just as they will say any commission to probe what Americans really knew before the war and major terrorism is a whitewash unless it blackens Bush.
The savage host of critics are selective in research. Each week brings taunting e-mails from readers who just can't stand any columnist who defended the war and suggest that if I love the Americans so much, why don't I move there.
A tempting thought during cold spells, but I'm happy to be a Canadian in Canada, thanks.
There are several reasons not to disown the war, and I was reminded of one, ironically, by last year's action movie by Bruce Willis. Hardly Oscar material, but Tears of the Sun dealt with foreigners stopping massacres. Up on the screen came the immortal words of the British writer and statesman, Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Since Burke wrote that in 1795, good men have often done nothing because diplomacy says you don't interfere inside a sovereign state, even if millions are being murdered, starved or jailed. Bush and Blair chose to change that, to attack a mass murderer and his henchmen. There was never any dispute about the evil, just how much Saddam could export.
Remember Joseph Wilson, the last U.S. diplomat to deal with Saddam, who said Niger hadn't sold Iraq the uranium needed for nuclear weapons? His testimony was used to discredit Bush because he thought war was a democracy's last option, except he also made it plain that Saddam was a thug who needed to be disarmed because of the WMD threat and his ignoring of the UN. Hardly a ringing condemnation!
In the current Atlantic, there are 28 pages on Iraq, one article titled Blind Into Baghdad, arguing the occupation's a debacle because a vast amount of expert planning was wilfully ignored.
The second, Spies, Lies and Weapons: What Went Wrong, has a Bill Clinton intelligence analyst, Kenneth Pollack, detailing where the Americans erred. He says the exaggerated WMD estimates mean no foreigner will trust U.S. intelligence "to get it right" and the Bush administration "to tell the truth."
Except Pollack places most blame on intelligence failures, only some with Bush.
Why do so many ignore all the sweet fruits of victory? People are still dying in Iraq, but tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds will live because a tyrant who attacked his own people and other countries has been defanged. Saddam may have had no WMD, but intelligence was fooled because he pretended he did, and so did the inner circle who deluded him with costly WMD schemes. Turns out Libya, North Korea and Iran were bigger threats - intelligence got that wrong too - but after Saddam was trapped, fear of what the Americans did to him stopped their proliferation of dangerous weapons. Other countries (Syria, Afghanistan) have changed too.
This time the good men decided not to let evil triumph. We can't forget that even if searches found no WMD, only mass graves.
 World Fact Book (CIA)
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