Why the truth about Iraq remains so elusive
By Steve Chapman
Originally published June 6, 2003
CHICAGO - President Bush is such an admirer of Winston Churchill that
he keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office.
You don't have to agree with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,
who likens Mr. Bush to Churchill, to see that the president has taken one
of the British statesman's maxims to heart. "In wartime," Sir Winston
confided, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a
bodyguard of lies."
What is dawning on many people now is that in making the case for war,
the administration and its allies did not make a fetish of strict honesty and
candor. Why? Because if the American people had gotten the truth and
nothing but the truth, they might not have been willing to go along with the
whole enterprise.
But the strategy worked so beautifully that it's being used for the postwar
occupation as well. We were given no idea of what would happen once
victory was achieved, and we have been given no idea what lies ahead.
The danger for Mr. Bush is that one of these days, the public may be hit in
the face with a cold dash of reality.
The chief rationale for the invasion was that we had to prevent Saddam
Hussein from using his vast arsenal of unconventional weapons.
Unfortunately, those munitions have yet to be found, and Mr. Rumsfeld
now admits that they may never be, because the Iraqis may have
destroyed them.
Why a thug regime that defied the United Nations for years would be so
fastidious about eliminating all evidence of guilt at its hour of doom is a
deep mystery. But the administration would rather live with this puzzle
than admit that maybe Mr. Hussein didn't have the arsenal that Mr. Bush
told us about.
The U.S. government is not the only one capable of embellishing reality.
Mr. Bush's ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who may prove to be a
distant relative of Jayson Blair, put out a report saying that Iraq could use
its weapons on 45 minutes' notice. But an anonymous British intelligence
official told the BBC that claim was added at the insistence of the prime
minister and "wasn't reliable."
The administration also did its best to connect Mr. Hussein to the Sept.
11 atrocities. By endlessly relating the war on Iraq to the war on
terrorism, the president managed to create some useful confusion. By the
time the war began, 51 percent of Americans were operating on the
assumption that Mr. Hussein was "personally responsible" for the terrorist
attacks - which is about as plausible as blaming them on Lee Harvey
Oswald.
These deceptions are not exactly without precedent. If there is one
constant in American history, it's that presidents of both parties tell lies to
justify wars. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both made a habit of it
in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan intervened in Lebanon insisting it was a vital
U.S. interest, which his own national security adviser later admitted it was
not. Bill Clinton sent troops to Bosnia in 1995 with a promise that they'd
be home within 12 months. They're still there. So it should not be a
surprise that the current president was willing to mislead us to build
support for his invasion.
Nor has the quality of information available to the public improved since
the war. When it comes to the aftermath, the question is not whether
Americans were misinformed: The picture painted by hawks was that the
Iraqi people and their liberators would all live happily ever after, and that
has turned out to be a fairy tale.
No one in the White House predicted widespread looting, the collapse of
order, anti-American protests, continuing attacks on U.S. troops, or the
rise of fundamentalist Shiite groups. The only issue is whether the
administration failed to tell us out of ignorance or out of deceit - whether
the president and his aides were deliberately fooling us or inadvertently
fooling themselves.
In any case, the administration now has the problem of maintaining public
support for a mission that promises to be expensive, open-ended, messy
and thankless. But it has given the American people only the vaguest idea
what they can expect.
At a recent hearing, Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware
asked, "When is the president going to tell the American people that we're
likely to be in the country of Iraq for three, four, five, six, eight, 10 years,
with thousands of forces and spending billions of dollars?"
Republican Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Foreign
Relations Committee, complained that "the administration has not
sufficiently involved Congress and the American people in its plans
regarding the costs, methods and goals of reconstructing Iraq."
No, it hasn't, and it isn't about to.
Steve Chapman is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune
Publishing newspaper. His column appears Tuesdays and Fridays in The
Sun. |
