The process is often as important as the conclusion. And in this case, I think the process was more important than the conclusion.
Well...not always. If you think back to Lend-Lease, FDR did a good deal of lying to the country about his intentions too, until Pearl Harbor.
By not presenting a clear premise and a clear set of goals for Iraq, and by deceiving the nation into war, this administration has committed the most unforgivable crime IMO.
I think you have a solid half-a-point here. As Tom Friedman says, democracies don't like going to war in the first place and prefer their wars to be sprints and not marathons when they do go. Bush didn't do a good job of preparing the country for a marathon, though most people of sense knew it would be a long job, just as they knew that Clinton was lying when he said that we'd be out of Bosnia within 18 months. However the premise - we need to get rid of Saddam - and the goals - create a stable democracy in Iraq to be an example of an Arab success story - are pretty clear-cut, I think.
BUT I take exception to the charge of "deception" which is being bandied about, largely for partisan reasons. Giving a reason which you believe in yourself is not deception even if it doesn't pan out. Moreoever, as I have noted several times, Bush had many reasons to get rid of Saddam - failing containment, Saddam's continual surreptitious & open terrorist links, Saddam's successful pose as the The Great Arab Defier, defiance of UN resolutions galore, and various reasonable fears of what Saddam might do with his WMD programs in future. WMDs were the easiest 'sell' but would NEVER have been chosen if Bush had had doubts about their being found, for the obvious reason that looking like a fool or a liar is not to his advantage!
So if we're trying to have an intelligent coversation here and not a partisan yelling match, can we have an end to these charges of deception? either that, or show some evidence that Bush knew ahead of time that Saddam had really destroyed his stocks of WMD.
The idea that Saddam had really destroyed his WMDs without telling the UN seemed too crazy for anyone to use it as their working hypothesis. Maybe it was true after all. But nobody believed it. We still don't know it for sure - what was in those containers that were shipped to Syria in January? what is the full inventory of Saddam's thousands of weapons caches? Until we know the answer to these questions, we won't know for sure. |
