Ok, so I’ve been posting a lot on the so-called search for Iraqi WMD lately and, in rereading what I’ve written (after various comments by people, usually phrased as “What the f*?”) maybe I should move to less news posting and more rambling. I’m sure you’re all thrilled with this news.
Why am I so preoccupied with the counterterrorist version of “Where’s Waldo” now taking place in Iraq right now? After all, anyone I was able to keep still for more than a few minutes over the past year would be fully aware that I never thought this was about Iraq’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. First of all, we all knew that Iraq had [EDIT: as in "use to"; I'm not contradicting my second point] WMD; we gave them, and the technology to produce chemical and biological weapons (CW and BW, respectively) in the ‘80s as a counter to the rise of Islamist Iran – which were used to a great extent in the Iran-Iraq War. And why shouldn’t we have? Encouraging one expansionist country (that desperately needed working port facilities that Kuwait and Iran had and, thanks to the Brits, they didn’t) to block another (that wanted to spread and ideology and revolution region/worldwide) makes perfect sense. Iraq really wanted these weapons to counter balance Iran’s conventional military capabilities, which, by 2002, had surpassed their 1980s capabilities. (As an interesting side note, the Iranians were building up to thwart the oncoming American invasion, telling their people to prepare to fight to the death as Americans would fight from village to village to conquer them.)
Secondly, we knew that he didn’t [EDIT: as in "in the year/months before the war"] have them. Or, more accurately, we didn’t know that he did have them. Logical twist, let’s look at LBJ running for Congress as an example: Late in the election, far behind in the polls, LBJ decides to begin a pseudo-grassroots campaign saying his opponent was a “pigfucker” – since it’s only possible to prove that you did do something, and impossible to prove that something didn’t happen, his opponent’s attempts to deny the rumor ended his campaign. Ok. So. Demanding that Saddam prove that he didn’t have WMD is logically impossible. Saddam didn’t comply, because he thought he would lose more face than if he did.
Thirdly, we know that WMD had nothing to do with the USvIraq romp that we all witnessed. Wolfowitz himself was quite open that the US was more than willing to go in for whatever reason, and Rumsfeld has been writing that we should have Carthridge-ed Baghdad since 1991.
So?
So apparently the Bush administration lied to us.
So?
In the words of the great media source of our time (The Onion) “President’s Washington through Bush May have Lied About Key Matters”. Really, I’m widely of the opinion that the vast majority of people are too stupid to handle international affairs (not counting anyone reading this, of course). What’s more of an interesting issue is the political fall out, here and abroad.
What price is Blair now paying, and going to pay, for absolute humiliation for being caught lying? Dunno. But it doesn’t look pretty. When his first super-secret white paper on Iraqi WMD turned out to be the product of an intern and a Google search, only a few weeks after the second white paper was revealed to have been taken (without permission!) from a PhD thesis – and particularly after it was revealed that Blair kept sending the reports back until they matched his political objectives – the MI6 (UK’s version of the CIA) humiliated Downing Street by demanding that the Prime Minister never try to pass off his “intelligence” as coming from them again. And yes, the pun was intended by both me and by the British intelligence community. Blair is priming to get Thatcher-ized: there’s no organized opposition party (insert Democrat joke here), but his own party is starting to get that “blood!” look in their eyes.
And US fall out?
Mixed but growing. After Bush announced in Poland that he had found WMD labs only to be corrected two days later (the “mobile labs” are actually balloon stations) some people were miffed. But fallout has really been weak, despite huge tectonic shifts such as the NSC intelligence office quitting and then criticizing the Bush administration for not handling little problems like “terrorism” or “other countries” well.
Still, the administration can be happy with the knowledge that over a third of Americans believe that we have found WMD in Iraq. And even more believe that there is an Al Qaeda – Iraq connection, despite the CIA coming public saying that a) there isn’t and b) Bush can go eat a pretzel when it comes to attributing any more of his “intelligence” to them – they’ve busted everyone at the CIA who went along with the White House.
We’re looking at the political costs of an administration that was overwhelmingly occupied with PR. And rightly so – they needed strong public backing for anything to work. But they could have done it with spin, rather than lies, and getting lazy is going to cost them. Moreover, as the NSC official pointed out, the moral crusade of the neo-fascist branch of the Republican Party (and yes it exists, just like the neo-communist branch of the Dems, so calm down) has crippled America’s ability to fight terrorism. The emphasis on PR rather than engaging the public (on the administration’s terms, remember: the public’s stupid), and the idea that they are on a mission from god (name that movie!) has both dominated American politics as of late, and has eroded American power abroad.
The American response (by the administration and the people) has been to redouble efforts. I like to call it the Westmoreland-technique of recovering from a setback.
And, Phil, if we’re not suffering from a setback, why are we negotiating with the Taliban to help gain control of Afghanistan? Yea.
After the formal disintegration of the Democratic Party in 2002, it’s difficult to see where the road leads from here. Bush will doubtlessly get reelected, but will he change his ways? Will the administrations lean to listen? Will I ever shut up? There are some answers, that we will just never know.