A rchive Date
[ 22-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goldstein_jul22.html
Just find the #?!*& weapons
Bush and Blair must ante up on Iraq - no more changing the subject, no more excuses
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN -- Toronto Sun
July 22, 2003
It would be a very good idea if the Tony Blair and George Bush administrations concentrated on finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) right now .
That is, as opposed to conducting apparent witch hunts against a low-level British civil servant who has now committed suicide, or reportedly smearing a gay, Canadian-born ABC news reporter who interviewed angry American soldiers in Iraq.
The suicide of David Kelly - at least, it was a suicide as far as we know - looks like a case of an innocent man being caught in a vicious tug-of-war between Blair's government and the BBC over their respective credibilities.
At the heart of the debate is whether an interview Kelly gave to a BBC reporter, from which an allegation was made that the Blair government had "sexed up" its intelligence on Iraq's WMD, was in fact "sexed up" by the BBC itself.
It will now be up to a judicial inquiry to decide that, but anyone who saw the forlorn Kelly being grilled by a parliamentary committee shortly before he committed suicide had to come away appalled. Appalled by watching someone who was by all accounts a decent man and a mild-mannered scientist being torn apart by people with huge political axes to grind.
And worse, being torn apart for reasons utterly peripheral and irrelevant to the central controversy the U.S. and Great Britain now face following their invasion of Iraq.
That is, not who said what to whom before or after the war, but rather, where are the WMD Blair and Bush repeatedly told us Saddam Hussein had?
Same goes for the saga of ABC television reporter Jeffrey Kofman - who worked for the Toronto Sun in the early 1980s before going to the CBC and later to the U.S. Following an interview with disillusioned U.S. soldiers in Iraq - one of whom famously said he'd ask for U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation if he could - Kofman was identified on the popular Drudge Report as both gay and Canadian.
Matt Drudge told the Washington Post he was tipped to this by the White House communications office. The White House said it had no knowledge of this and it would be inappropriate if it happened. In any event, the report prompted some right-wing pundits to slam Kofman for being unreliable, presumably because he's not only openly gay, but also from pacifist Canada, an argument that is so stupid - just as Kelly's death is so tragic - that the underlying truth it reveals is this. That some in the Bush and Blair administrations - or at the very least their backers - are increasingly desperate to change the subject and to find scapegoats in order to avoid the key question - where are Iraq's WMD?
Only one solution
If Bush and Blair and their supporters want to shut up the growing chorus of people now questioning their invasion of Iraq, there's only way to do it - find Iraq's WMD.
So far, the debate has focused on the intelligence Bush and Blair received going into the war and whether they and members of their administration received bad intelligence, goosed the intelligence they had or lied in order to bolster public support for a pre-emptive invasion.
But the root cause of the continuing controversy is the failure, three months after the war was officially declared over, to find any convincing evidence of Iraq's WMD.
The case Bush and Blair made for pre-emptive war was crystal clear. It was not built primarily on the fact Saddam was a murderous tyrant that the world is better rid of, with which no one seriously disagrees. Rather, it was based on the argument that Saddam was an imminent threat to other nations because he had WMD he might give to terrorists.
For many of us who supported this war, it was a convincing argument because in a post-9/11 world we accepted the logic that nations could no longer afford to wait for a smoking gun - meaning a gun that has already gone off - before acting.
But if it turns out there was no gun, the U.S. and Great Britain have a big problem - the same problem a cop has when he shoots someone because he says they were about to shoot him, and then it turns out there's no gun.
Neo-con rhetoric
It's also time to dispense with silly neo-con rhetoric that any demand Bush and Blair produce convincing evidence of the WMD they said Iraq possessed prior to invading it, is disloyal, amounts to giving aid and comfort to the enemy or is all part of a vast left-wing conspiracy.
Nonsense. Since when it is disloyal for anyone - no matter where they stood on the war - to ask that the governments that waged it provide proof that what they told us was their major reason for attacking was true?
It all comes down to this. Either the U.S. and Great Britain will produce convincing evidence of the WMD they said Iraq had, or their international credibility will take an enormous hit and the domestic political consequences will be huge.
Where are the WMD Bush and Blair said Iraq had? That is the issue, not changing the subject, not bringing unbearable pressure to bear on a low-level civil servant and not smearing a reporter who revealed that in this war, as in every war, grunt soldiers always bitch and complain and believe their higher-ups don't know what they're doing. So what?
Those aren't key issues. The key issue is that the Bush and Blair administrations told us Saddam had WMD and the danger was that he might hand them over to terrorists. Indeed, that he might already have done so. So let's stick to the simple question. Where are Iraq's WMD?
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com. Or visit his home page. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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