A rchive Date
[ 29-06-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1971371
Just cause for asking about WMDs
By ELLEN GOODMAN
June 28, 2003, 12:30AM
Last month, when President Bush donned his coronation clothes and landed on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, I felt like the skunk at the victory party. I kept asking: Where are the weapons of mass destruction?
What bothered me wasn't just whether we'd find the weapons we were warned about with such terrifying certainty. The question was whether it would matter.
Would the American people care if they'd been conned into conflict? I was haunted by a congressional aide who said the absence of the smoking guns of WMD wouldn't "sway public opinion much," because "everyone loves to be on the winning side."
A column on the con job filled my e-mail box with hundreds of missives, ranging from an accountant who protested my "whiny screed" to a Californian who rued the "outrage fatigue" dulling the public's mind.
Since then, the search for the WMD has prompted the president to switch seamlessly from proclaiming certainty about the weapons to certainty about weapons programs. There's now a congressional inquiry asking whether the intelligence community offered faulty ingredients or the executive chef cooked up a recipe for war.
But public opinion has yet to sway. The most recent Washington Post / ABC poll reports that two-thirds of those surveyed believe the war was justified - even if we don't find weapons of mass destruction. Maybe they love to be on the winning side; maybe they're happy to see a dictator bite the dust. But they think it was, in short, justified even if the justification wasn't just.
I have had trouble believing there are no WMD. Still, we haven't found the "thousands of tons of chemical agents" or the "massive stockpile of biological weapons," and the imminent threat of nukes turned out to be a scam.
As this becomes apparent, a lot of folks are busily parsing the difference between a lie and an exaggeration. But by any definition, the script for a preventive war of pre-emptive self-defense was a craftily designed White House sales pitch.
So we don't know whether there are WMD. But more importantly, we still don't know the real reasons why Bush went to war and why he thought those reasons wouldn't "sell."
Did we launch this war, as one pro-war e-mailer boasted, to "flex our muscles"? To tell the post-9 / 11 world not to screw around with a superpower? To rid the world of Saddam Hussein? Was it for oil? Revenge?
The real lie is that the administration didn't (dare?) make its essential case for war. And the real shame is not that we were conned but, so far, we don't mind.
"As one who meanders around the middle on most issues," writes a St. Paul woman, "I am as disgusted with the hypocrisy of the right as with the gutlessness of the left." Writes a Santa Monica, Calif., reader, "Why is everybody being so freaking nice about it?"
A generation ago, Nightline began its tenure with each show announcing that it was Day 12 or Day 120 in the Iran hostage crisis.
Where is the network today that would track Day 75 in the search for WMD? Where is the Democratic candidate who would adopt this admittedly high-risk strategy? Where is the member of the White House team who is willing to resign to protest being misled into misleading?
Instead, the president draws yet another link between 9 / 11 and Iraq, telling $4 million worth of donors in New York last Monday that "Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got." And he gets away with it.
It's being said that this war marked the beginning of the American Empire in our relationship to the world.
How about domestically? An empire doesn't have citizens; it has subjects. Subjects don't expect to challenge the emperor or even to be told the facts.
This New American Empire begins at home. The famous flight suit may end up at the Smithsonian as the emperor's new clothes.
Goodman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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