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Red
Meat Chronicles:
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Seeking to justify an unprecedented use of military force preemptively against the people of Iraq, President Bush exhorted a nation to war by declaring unequivocally there was "no doubt" (his words, not mine) Sadaam Hussain possessed huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which he was capable of using, and poised immediately to use, against the United States. Turns out, those claims were bogus, so now the President seeks to diminish the gravity of that error by insisting (1) he never claimed the threat from Sadaam was "imminent," it was only "gathering," and (2) Sadaam did have the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, even if he didn't have any such weapons at the time we attacked. Leaving aside the technicality that Mr. Bush didn't tell us that when he defied the international community and refused to wait even one more month to give inspectors time to complete their work in Iraq, the truth is that the current version casts this nation in even worse light than the truth. (Apparently, it's regarded as rather rude to attack a sovereign nation with military force without some at least superficially plausible justification). 1) If Iraq was not an "imminent" threat, but only a "gathering" one, why did we need to launch a preemptive war? If "preemptive war" can ever be justified, surely it can only be sanctioned in situations where it is necessitated by a threat so imminent, so immediate, and so grave it can only be abated by the extraordinary step of striking first. If Mr. Bush is right that there was no "imminent" threat from Iraq, but only a "gathering" one, then what we engaged in was not preemptive war, at all, but what I would call "prophylactic war" precautionary use of military force, just in case the adversary might be plotting ill against us. Frankly, it is unimaginable to me that the American public would have sanctioned a "prophylactic war," not required by an "imminent" threat, but only a strategy to take out a bad guy before he could "gather" the wherewithal to threaten the U.S. imminently. The presidential insistence that he never said (and, therefore, presumedly never believed) that the threat posed by Iraq was "imminent," destroys any basis for claiming a "preemptive war" was justifiable. It's this simple: does "preemptive war" require an "imminent" threat to be justifiable or not? If so, by presidential concession, this "preemptive war" was illicit and President Bush knew that all along, since he never said nor implied according to him that the threat from Sadaam was imminent. 2) If Sadaam really did have a "capacity" to build weapons of mass destruction (I suspect Mexico and Canada and many other nations have similar "capacities," since they have pharmaceutical plants and capable scientists), but there was no WMD, then obviously he wasn't much of a threat he didn't use the capacity we claim he had. If he had the capacity, but wasn't using it, (at least not recently) that's pretty good evidence he wasn't a present danger at all (imminent, "gathering" or otherwise), for if he had been such a danger, surely he would have been using his "capacity" to produce the dangerous weapons. Moreover, if what we were concerned about was "capacity" not weapons themselves but the facilities to manufacturer them -- that clearly is a threat which could effectively be dealt with through the inspections regime. Unlike WMD themselves, "capacity" to manufacture weapons of mass destruction is not something which could be hidden readily from inspectors or secreted out of the country. It's pretty difficult to bury a factory or industrial plant, and inspection teams and satellites can ultimately locate and dismantle them without launching war. So when Mr. Bush claims Sadaam had the "capacity" to manufacture WMD, even though he was not currently making use of such facilities for that prohibited purpose, he essentially admits that inspections rather than war could have dealt effectively with the "gathering" threat. At least, it seems to me he owes the American people and the world an explanation why inspections would not be adequate to deal with "capacity" as opposed to WMD themselves. President Bush could have explained, "Like I led you to believe, I really thought Sadaam posed an imminent threat. And we went to war because we had no doubt he had weapons of mass destruction. We were wrong. If I had known then what I know now, our strategy (at least our timing) would probably have been different than it was." And that kind of candor could well have marked a leader. But this idea that we launched a preemptive war to deal with a non-imminent threat posed by the existence of capacity to produce WMD is pure revisionist history it's just a lame, dishonest attempt to justify the unjustifiable with a rationale which not only didn't exist at the time, but, if true, should have resulted in restraint (containment and continuation of the inspections regime) rather than aggressive, preemptive war. This latest explanation the threat wasn't imminent; we were only concerned that it might become so in the future, because he did possess currently unused capacity (which we could have eliminated through inspections) which could have been used in the future to renew Sadaam's murderous objectives, so we did something this nation has never done before launched a military attack against a sovereign nation before a threat became real or "imminent" seems to me to betray a policy more bellicose and bullying than the United States really deserves. In my mind, it makes matters worse, not better But what do you expect from a president who promises he would not use American troops to engage in "nation building" and then does just that, a president who claims to be a "uniter" and presides over the most bitterly partisan administration in memory, a president who tells the American people his budget will produce a $340 billion deficit and a month later admits it's more than half a trillion dollars just to name a few of the prevarications of this Administration. To Republicans who insist this upcoming election is about tax cuts and tort reform and gay marriage and right-wing judicial appointments, I say, it's about the truth, stupid. (And jobs, and health care, and education, and civil rights for all Americans). Gerry Birnberg |
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