I believe that New York Times journalist Thomas L. Friedman is the preeminent foreign affairs columnist in the country. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes, which is approximately three more than yours truly. My inability to debate Mr. Friedman on matters of foreign affairs notwithstanding, I am troubled that he would opine that it does not matter whether the United States uncovers weapons of mass destruction as advertised in the pre-war propaganda. With all due respect to Mr. Freidman: It does matter!
In his April 27 column, Mr. Friedman wrote the following: “As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).” Mr. Friedman’s choice of the word hyped is an interesting one, for our purposes it carries three possibilities: A) greatly exaggerated B) Somebody or something greatly publicized C) A deception or dishonest scheme. I am using my number 2 pencil to color in C. What else would explain the deafening silence by the Bush Administration as to why WMD have yet to be found?
The certainty of WMD prior to the war has been met with a similar degree of meekness in the post war search for said items. Are we entering into a new phase of public policy whereby the leadership can overtly deceive the American people as long as the outcome is to our liking? Does the end justify the means? That belief is supported by the recent CBS/New York Times poll that nearly half believe the White House overestimated the existence of WMD and two-thirds of those believe the administration did so deliberately. And a majority of those polled find this behavior to be a necessary evil.
This is a far cry from the pre-war ABC News/Washington Post poll that showed only 38 percent felt the war effort was justified even if there were no WMD were discovered. In spite of the most recent poll data I submit that finding a significant amount of WMD matters for two reasons. First, WMD ultimately became the primary reason for going to war. The Bush Administration sought to demonstrate links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, ties between Saddam and 9/11, prove Iraq was an eminent threat, all with little success before finally deciding on WMD as the reason. White House spokesperson Ari Fleisher stated on April 10, WMD was “what this war was all about.” Second, either U.S. intelligence got it wrong or someone lied. Did not Secretary of State Colin Powell go to the United Nations, showing the world aerial photos of possible weapon sites and intercepted phone conversations as proof of Iraqi misdeeds?
On December 10, 2002 the Bush Administration declared that it had “solid” intelligence that Iraq has kept WMD. What happened? The war is over and the intelligence is now not so solid. Conservatives taught us during the Clinton era that dishonesty in the Oval Office matters. If Bill Clinton not having sex with that woman matters, why is it that the lack of WMD in Iraq is irrelevant? Why didn’t the president use some of that meteoric high job approval rating capital accumulated during the war to explain that somebody’s analysis was off?
He could have explained it while he was “Top Gunning” it on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. There are 128 American soldiers who returned home by way of Dover A.F.B. There were several reporters who gave their lives for this effort and we do not know the number of Iraqi men, women, and children whose only crime against humanity was living in Iraq in 2003 who also died as the result of this war.
I agree with Mr. Freidman that removing Saddam from power so that the world
could see the level of his brutality is a wonderful byproduct, but it is potentially
a byproduct of a lie. It does matter whether or not this administration was
less than honest about getting the country into a war for a reason that longer
appears to exist. If the failure to locate WMD does not matter then the United
States is participating in a thinly veiled form of imperialism. If so, there
will be no need to ever again ask, “Why do they hate us?”