The Daily Whim
A Photo Gallery With An Attitude
Thu. May 08, 2003
Search for the Reasons
Search for the Reasons – When a nation of hundreds of millions of free and opinionated people goes to war (even with a 70/30 split), it’s really hard to say there’s One Reason. Heck, it’s hard for this one person to give you one reason.
As I’ve argued in various ways since last August, to me, the primary reason was to clean up the mess that we’d made 12 years ago. We left a demonstrably dangerous megalomaniac in power, told the Iraqi people they’d have to do the dirty work and rise up against him, and then stood by and did nothing when he slaughtered them by the thousands.
But, of course, nations do not admit that their foreign policy is driven by cleaning up their past mistakes. The fact is that most of the other reasons given, from the harsh suppression of dissenters to retain power, to the continued obstinance over chemical weapons, were the result of that 12 year old mistake. The Root Reason from which all others flowed, at least, to my way of thinking.
But that’s not the way it was sold by the Bush administration. Some say it was some kind of “bait and switch,” where weapons of mass destruction were used as the pretext, but now it’s about the obvious freedom Iraqi’s now enjoy (right down to openly protesting our presence). Others might argue that the administration used the only “handle” they had to try and make this a more international effort, and that 12 year old “handle” was the UN inspections process. When Libya chairs the UN Human Rights Commission, do you think much headway would have been made in the UN simply on the behalf of the oppressed Iraqi people?
Whatever your position, we are all left with some odd questions. Even Hans Blix said there were tens of thousands of gallons of chemical precursors that they knew existed, but which Iraq would neither account for, or prove they’d destroyed. If those stocks are now “gone,” why wouldn’t Saddam have taken public credit for that? Why would he destroy things in secret when he knew the UN had certain knowledge of them?
Whatever they may be, the answers are out there, but it seems clear to me there’s a lot of unraveling to do. Austin Bay offers his estimate: “So how long could it take to shakedown Iraq for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? [...] Operations of this size aren’t wired in an afternoon; the number of field teams currently deployed hasn’t been publicized. In late April, Gen. Tommy Franks said that several thousand sites would be surveyed. Syria remains a question mark. However, four months still strikes me as a reasonable time frame. That means early September is a fair date for drawing conclusions about Saddam’s weapons.”
Well, if the UN inspectors had 12 years, and in the end demanded still more time, I guess four months to cover an area the size of California seems reasonable, doesn’t it? But that doesn’t stop the questions from being asked in Time Warp Land, the Kingdom of Impatience, the Island of Instant Gratification, er, America.
Rafe Colburn goes after the specifics in Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, and says he awaits a long article detailing whether Powell’s specific claims were true or false. He notes that an article in the Washington Post said “none of Powell’s claims had been substantiated” ... as of 17 days after Saddam’s statue was toppled (even though it wasn’t, people now denote that event as The End of The War).
I’m not singling Mr. Colburn out because he’s representative of impatience, I simply saw his piece linked at dangerousmeta, and he closes by bringing home the real point: “The other question that must also be asked is why I care in the first place. We went to war with Iraq, we won the war, and there’s little doubt that Iraqis are better off without Saddam than they were with him. The reason I’m still keeping track of this stuff is that I firmly believe we were led to war under false pretenses. I said it before the war, I said it during the war, and I’ve said it since. Next year we’re going to have a Presidential election in which the incumbent is a man who played upon the rightful fears of Americans to gain their assent to a war fought for reasons that he and his advisors would rather not openly acknowledge.”
I’d say the truth of that last sentence remains to be seen, but I am also very curious to have all the answers. Even though not much time has passed since it ended, it’s plain that a lot of people were wrong about this war, in various ways.
99.99% of them don’t face reelection. But it has been clear for a long time that this war would have a great impact on the 2004 campaign, on both sides of the political fence, and for those who tend to straddle it (and, trust me, that’s a shaky place these days). That election day is 18 months away.
It will no doubt be an important one. So, don’t we want to base our decisions on the most complete info we can get? Even if that takes time? And patience? If we don’t get full answers about Saddam’s Supposed Weapons until, oh, say, September, will 14 months before the election give us enough time to assess it?
We just witnessed a war in which, time and time again, the quick answer the media provided turned out to be wrong, once there was enough time to truly assess the facts. In addition to that lesson, I know I personally became highly sensitive to the bias apparent in every media source, across the spectrum. Thus, I want time to get all the facts, and then patiently filter them.
And that’s probably a glimpse of my personal hell over the coming 1.5 years. As heated discussions develop over politics and foreign policy, talk of “time and patience” will carry the weight of a long slow whisper at a convention of auctioneers.
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I agree that there are simply too many "lies" and obfuscations coming out of this Administration. Simple case-in-point: The USS Abraham Lincoln is supposedly in excess of 200 nautical miles off the coast of San Diego; this is in excess of helicopter range and requires fixed-wing to cover the distance. Meanwhile, right here at home, I can track the Lincoln coming across the Pacific on the Net and it appears to be about 150 nautical miles off the coast. Now, today, I see that Ari Spinmeister 'retracts' his earlier statement and says USS Lincoln was only 39 nautical miles off the coast; -which negates his whole rationale for the S3 Viking photo-op. Bush et al are not stupid by any means; -they just have no respect for the American people. Time and time again we are fed these cock-and-bull 'stories' only to find out afterwards that we have been gulled and manipulated once again. I've given up; this Administration has lost all credibility.
“I agree that there are simply too many 'lies' and obfuscations coming out of this Administration.” This echoes similar things we heard about our last President, in heaping volumes. Now we're hearing it again. From one side or the other, it's been going on for more than a decade. I'm reminded of the quote that says maybe we get the government we deserve, or as H. L. Mencken put it, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
This WaPo article makes it sound as if the failure to find WMDs by now really is unexpected and causing embarrassment in the administration. They can't have searched the whole country yet, but the planned targets are all coming up dry, every one of them.
Yeah, Matt, there are some odd questions, and they probably some odd answers, too. I've particularly noted that what we have found, like the suspected mobile lab, has evidence of being severely scrubbed down. Now, maybe that's just a sign that Saddam demanded cleanliness. But I have a feeling there was a decision at some point to "scrub down" sites, and consolidate the programs in a more hideable manner. But I also think it will be several months before we have assembled a clear picture. Certainly, long after the Post's deadline for that article.
I remember wondering at many times over the past year whether Bush should have been hitting the WMD justification for the war so hard. It's not as if there weren't other perfectly good reasons (which I'm now glad I leaned on heavily in my own justifications toward the end of the run-up to invasion). And at times various people, such as Bush and Rice, pointed out quite reasonably that the burden of proof wasn't actually on them-- according to various UN resolutions, Saddam had to do things that he hadn't done. But in the end, Bush stressed that the weapons of mass destruction were there, and we'd find them. Maybe we will, but I have a feeling that, since there aren't piles of nukes lying around everywhere, whatever we do find won't be considered sufficient justification by critics of the war, or by some people who were on the fence. And it won't bring Saddam back, but it will reflect badly on Bush. From a perfectly Machiavellian perspective, as a vaguely hawkish Democrat who would like to see Bush out of office, I suppose I should be delighted at this. But it seems dirty to cheer. (And I think Bush is going to get reelected anyway-- because for him to lose somebody else has to win, and I can't imagine who that would be.) (One thing that I do know is that I'm not looking forward to the Democratic convention in Boston next year. A friend of mine who lives in town is predicting 1968-level chaos and violence; it seems like it might be that kind of time, with the left deeply divided and tearing itself apart, and Internet-organized flash crowds becoming increasingly important in political theater.)
"I remember wondering at many times over the past year whether Bush should have been hitting the WMD justification for the war so hard. It's not as if there weren't other perfectly good reasons" I agree, but how well could those reasons have been leveraged to build a coalition? From the conclusion of the Gulf War in '91, we've had a specific cease fire agreement with Iraq which has spawned a vast UN mechanism devoted almost solely to two things [1] WMD inspections and [2] the $35 Billion Oil-for-Food program. That was the existing framework, and the best means to try and build international support. Especially in retrospect, I find it pretty amazing that last November we got a 15-0 vote on Resolution 1441 in the UN Security Council ... including Syria. Although there were other valid reasons, would any of them have garnered that kind of unanimity that quickly? The UN framework was already in place on WMD. "And I think Bush is going to get reelected anyway-- because for him to lose somebody else has to win, and I can't imagine who that would be." Ouch. That one may be QuoteLog worthy. "One thing that I do know is that I'm not looking forward to the Democratic convention in Boston next year." Sounds like a webloggers dream, to me. Load up the digital camera, and take in the scene. But then, my experience was shooting the much tamer 1988 Democratic Convention.
My issue is not patient. If I thought the Bush administration were making every effort possible to find these weapons (before they fall into the hands of the terrorist that they claim threaten us), and indeed that they had ever been serious about finding those weapons, I'd feel differently. We allowed many weapons sites to be looted before we could inspect them, for God's sake. It's not that WMD have not yet been found (although if we were talking about the level of weapons that Colin Powell discussed in his February UN speech, they certainly would have been found by now), but that the Bush administration is already distancing itself from the idea that they ever will be found. And even though WMD were the lever for garnering international support, the Rumsfeldians were talking about invading Iraq for so long before we ever turned to that justification that we couldn't get many other countries to support us anyway. In any case, it seems most Americans are tolerant of the idea that the President can tell us any lies he likes to get us to go to war, so I'm a voice in the wilderness anyway.