The man didn't vote to go to war...what's your point.
Al
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Not Getting the Truth
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, October 16, 2003; Page A25
BERLIN -- In 1967, following the ambush and mauling of an American unit in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland awarded Purple Hearts to the wounded. One of them was Bud Barrow, a top sergeant with plenty of experience, who politely told the general that his outfit had "walked into one of the damnedest ambushes you ever seen." Westmoreland corrected him. "Oh, no, no, no, that was no ambush," the general told the man who had been there. Rank has its privileges -- and one of them is to turn black into white.
I cite this incident, taken from David Maraniss's magisterial and brilliant new book, "They Marched Into Sunlight," for a reason. It is not because I think that what is happening today in Iraq is necessarily what happened in Vietnam decades ago. It's because once again we have a government that baldly insists on telling us what we know is not true.
Take, for instance, Vice President Cheney's recent speech. In it, he repeated the now-discredited charge that the war in Iraq was "an essential step in the war on terror." He trotted out the old bugaboos of weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda and, of course, reminded us that Saddam Hussein was a beast, a fact that not even critics of the war dispute. "They must concede . . . that had their own advice been followed, that regime would rule Iraq today," he said.
Hear, hear. But also, wait a minute. We now know -- as we did even before the war -- that Iraq's links to al Qaeda and therefore to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were so tenuous as to be nearly nonexistent. The celebrated meeting between an Iraqi official and one of the Sept. 11 hijackers happened only in the minds of administration propagandists. There is no proof of it. In fact, the terrorist in question is now believed to have been somewhere else that day.
Weapons of mass destruction have not been found. It now seems possible that the much-abused United Nations inspectors did a credible job. Of course Hussein once had such weapons and used them, but sanctions and inspections -- not to mention the looming threat of war -- may actually have done the trick. If these weapons programs still existed, particularly the nuclear one, they did so in the most rudimentary form. This was no just-in-time program.
President Bush now says the American people "aren't getting the truth" about Iraq, and so he has taken his pitch to regional media outlets that are thought to be more compliant than the national newspapers and television networks. He forgets that many of the national outlets originally supported the war in Iraq -- my own Washington Post and yours truly come to mind. Now the president says that great and wonderful things are happening in Iraq but that the media are unaccountably fixated on the daily suicide bombings and the general chaos.
But there are plenty of reports about progress in Iraq -- the opening of schools, etc. Still, both the press and the American public are entitled to wonder whether these numbers add up to anything more than wishful thinking. Vietnam -- that awful analogy -- also produced its hopeful numbers, enemy body counts and the like, and while they were often wrong and sometimes just plain lies, even when they were true, they were largely beside the point. A school could be opened -- and the students still fight you at night.
More to the point is the administration's Westmorelandish insistence on asserting the insupportable -- that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the United States because he was linked to terrorism and armed to the teeth with those awful weapons. There is no truth to that -- none. And yet Bush continues to insist on it. Once, it was possible merely to argue the matter, as some of the Europeans did. Now, though, questions about facts have become questions of judgment -- and candor. How can we believe what Bush says about the reconstruction of Iraq when we no longer believe the rest of what he says?
I am ensconced here at the American Academy in Berlin. I came to see my country from abroad, to defend it and what it did in Iraq (to the extent that I can), but the task has become increasingly difficult. No one specifically mentions Vietnam -- that's my own point of reference -- but they wonder about an administration that has been ambushed by the facts in Iraq and insists it has been vindicated.
It's one thing to be an Ugly American. It's another to be a dumb one. |
