Only by Swallowing Big Lies Can Powell
Justify a War
latimes.com
By Robert Scheer:
February 4, 2003
E-mail story
We know in advance that Colin Powell's performance
will be flawless. His military career has prepared him
well to execute the orders of his commander in chief, no
matter what his doubts as to their morality, efficacy or
logic. Making a seamless case for preemptive war on
Iraq to the United Nations, the secretary of State can
draw on his decade of wartime experience in which he
publicly justified the deaths of more than a million
Vietnamese, tens of thousands of Americans and
hundreds of thousands of Laotians and Cambodians.
It took two decades for Powell, in his autobiography
"My American Journey," to acknowledge that all the
destruction brought down upon Indochina by the U.S.
was based on an uneducated, unfocused and
enormously costly policy that he and other military
leaders had known to be "bankrupt."
But duty, apparently, required they not tell the public the
truth.
"War should be the politics of last resort. And when we
go to war, we should have a purpose that our people
understand and support," he wrote, summarizing
Vietnam's lessons.
Does anybody outside of the extremist claque of
think-tank warriors bending the president's ear really
think we are at the point of "last resort" with Iraq, a poor
country half a world away that is already divvied up into
"no-fly" zones, crawling with U.N. inspectors and still
shattered economically and militarily from two previous
wars? Or that the American people, so divided and
apathetic in polls on the subject, "understand and
support" why we would start a firestorm in Baghdad and
then send our young men and women to fight in its
streets?
Regardless of Saddam Hussein's record of cruelty and
regional power ambitions, as a military man Powell should be employing a
straightforward equation: Does the target pose a direct threat to U.S. security? In
the case of Iraq in 2003, the answer can be yes only if Powell is prepared to
swallow a trio of Big Lies, the first of which is that Iraq possesses weapons of
mass destruction that pose a real threat to the U.S. or our allies.
"There is no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear program since the
elimination of the program in the 1990s," said the U.N.'s chief nuclear weapons
inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei.
Less clear is whether Iraq has made at least token efforts to replenish stocks of
biological and chemical weapons. In any case, Iraq can deliver payloads only to
regional enemies, and the most likely target, Israel, is armed with nuclear weapons.
However, Powell has gone way beyond these facts, claiming U.N. inspectors
found that Iraq was concealing and moving illicit material. The U.N.'s chief
weapons inspector, Hans Blix, categorically denied this in an interview last week
with the New York Times, part of a comprehensive rebuke to White House
exploitation and media misinterpretation of his balanced, dispassionate report.
Similarly, Powell and the president have employed an irresponsible pattern of
exaggeration and innuendo in an attempt to link Iraq to Al Qaeda. This shameful
canard molds a few extremely fuzzy and circumstantial bits of proto-evidence into
an absurdly convenient "proof" that taking over Iraq will help prevent
anti-American terrorism.
In a New York Times report Sunday, sources inside U.S. intelligence agencies
"said they were baffled by the Bush administration's insistence on a solid link
between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network," they were upset that "the
intelligence is obviously being politicized" and that "we've been looking at this hard
for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there." Blix also
said there was no evidence Iraq had or planned to supply weapons to Al Qaeda.
All of which brings us to the most outrageous Big Lie of the Bush administration:
that delaying an invasion to wait for the U.N. to complete inspections would
endanger the U.S. The fact is that for more than a decade the military containment
of Iraq has effectively neutered Hussein, and there is no reason to believe that
can't continue.
Of course, there is a case to be made for keeping up pressure on Iraq to cooperate
further with the U.N. It is, however, counterproductive to transparently lie to a
skeptical world and immoral to denigrate the inspection process because we are
afraid it will undermine our cobbled-together rationale for going to war.
As Powell knows from his Vietnam experience, lies have a way of catching up
with you. Years from now, if the U.S. is still spending billions trying to
micromanage the Middle East and reaping its rewards in blood, Bush will be
marked indelibly, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before him, as a leader
who went to war on a lie.
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