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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Before the war, the Bush administration said the weapons existed and we would find them. Now, it's saying maybe we won't find them after all -- and the rest of the world smells a rat.
Apr 30, 2003 | In his NBC interview last Thursday, President Bush set off critics by citing what appeared to be a new standard of proof for Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction.
No longer was the U.S. necessarily on the hunt for the actual weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, the president said. Rather, the investigation of suspect sites in Iraq by coalition forces would prove that Saddam Hussein "had a weapons of mass destruction program." The same day as the interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that "whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we're going to find out the truth."
This, of course, follows months of reassuring Americans that WMD would be found. Earlier this month, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer called the weapons "what this war was about"; and just Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that with the help of captured Iraqi leaders, the WMD "will be found." But now the administration seems to be preparing the country for news of evidence that WMD once existed in Iraq -- with no actual WMD -- and calling it a victory.
Part of this might be because, of the 55 Iraqi leaders Central Command has deemed "most wanted," 14 have been captured and, according to a report in the Associated Press, each -- including Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and chemical and biological weapons chieftain Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi -- is denying that Iraq had any WMD before the war.
The new talking points continued to proliferate following the interview with NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, with both official pronouncements and well-placed leaks. This may ultimately work in the United States, where many Americans are pleased with the toppling of Saddam's regime and hopes for a free and democratic Iraq. But the MIA WMD are not escaping notice in the rest of the world, nor is the shift in rhetoric. And it is all further damaging U.S. credibility and fanning the flames of anti-American sentiment.
Faced with questions about this shift on Friday, Fleischer explained that "the president has always said they had [WMD] right up to the war." In the Brokaw interview, Fleischer said, the president was merely explaining that the failure to discover them so far is assuredly due to the fact that "they may have hid some of them, they may have destroyed some of them, they may have dispersed some of them." This seemed even more of a retreat from definitive proclamations that the weapons will be found.
But Fleischer's protestations to the contrary, there clearly has been a shift in rhetoric. "It's a story that nobody really wants to touch because people are afraid of saying that the stuff isn't there and then later on being proven wrong," observes Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Lee Feinstein, who was the deputy director of the State Department policy planning staff during the Clinton administration. "So in some instances, the administration is getting a free pass on this."
It is getting a pass not only from the media, but from the opposition political organization known as the Democratic Party. Asked on Tuesday about the lack of WMD discoveries so far, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said it was "highly premature to make any final conclusion" about the lack of WMD, since "it's entirely possible that there are weapons. And if those weapons exist, we ought to continue to persist until we find them."
In Feinstein's opinion, the failure to find WMD "doesn't change the rightness of the war. But clearly when you have the secretary of state making presentations to the [United Nations] Security Council live on international television with visual aids" -- ones supposedly proving the presence of WMD posing an imminent threat to the world -- "you've got a lot of credibility on the line."
This is not necessarily the case in the U.S., however. On Sunday, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that evidence of Saddam's barbarism has convinced him that "we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war." And no questions were asked of Fleischer about the WMD hunt during his Tuesday briefing. Furthermore, two stories in the Sunday Times, which is, after all, the American paper of record, featured leaks that help prepare the public for an Easter egg hunt that turns up nothing but straw.
