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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (11391)	8/5/2003 12:00:16 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14610

online.wsj.com August 5, 2003 REVIEW & OUTLOOK The Imminence Invention In their latest attempts to discredit the liberation of Iraq, President Bush's critics have turned to falsifying the history of the standards that everyone used to justify it. Intervention was wrong, they now insist, because Saddam Hussein did not pose "an imminent threat." This could certainly use some parsing, especially because the majority of serious Democratic Presidential contenders have taken up the cudgel. Time and Newsweek cover star Howard Dean complains of the "failure to make the case that the threat was imminent enough to justify war." Florida Senator Bob Graham says that the credibility of the U.S. government will be "eroded" if weapons of mass destruction are not found "positioned in a way for imminent use." Imminence is suddenly also all over the talk shows. Former ambassador Joe Wilson, who first cast doubt on the Niger-yellowcake uranium story, popped up on CNN Sunday to concede that "I think we'll find chemical weapons. I think we'll find biological precursors that may or may not have been weaponized. And I think we'll find a continuing interest of -- on nuclear weapons." So he admits that Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. But Mr. Wilson then changes the subject by saying Saddam's toppling still wasn't justified because "The question really is whether it met the threshold test of imminent threat to our own national security or even the test of grave and gathering danger." All of this is simply an invention after the fact, and a dangerous one. President Bush did use the word "imminent" once in this year's State of the Union, but precisely to rebut the standard Mr. Wilson now wants to claim as the standard for American self-defense. "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent," Mr. Bush said, but he then rejected that test. "Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?" U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 also contains no such "imminence" threshold. That resolution drew a unanimous 15 votes not because the likes of France, Russia and even Syria were keen to ratchet up the pressure on Iraq, but because it was undeniable that Saddam was in violation of multiple prior resolutions. Resolution 1441 focused primarily on WMD at the request of France and Germany, but it did so by putting the onus squarely on Iraq to disarm. The burden of proof was on Saddam to make a truthful weapons declaration and comply with inspectors -- not on the U.S. to prove what weapons he had. When he failed to comply, the U.S. had full legal rights to act. The larger trouble with the imminence threshold is that in a post-September 11 world it is impossible to define and is therefore dangerous. When can we really say that the World Trade Center attack was "imminent?" Perhaps even Senator Graham would agree it was imminent on September 10, when the killers partied away in Portland, Maine, but of course by then it was too late to stop it except by luck. Was the threat imminent when the plot was hatched in Kuala Lumpur? When the hijackers entered the U.S.? When Mohammed Atta took pilot training courses? For that matter, when did the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Nazi invasion of Poland become "imminent." The message of the recently released Congressional report on September 11 is that we'll never have perfect intelligence. The best any President can do in this world of uncertainty is identify those with the intention and capability to harm us and our interests. And we pay Presidents to make these kinds of difficult judgments. That's precisely what Mr. Bush did regarding Iraq, describing the threat in his State of the Union speech as "serious and mounting." This is hard to dispute about a dictator who had already tried to develop a nuclear program, had gassed the Iranians, gassed the Kurds, invaded Kuwait, tried to kill a former U.S. President, and had thrown out U.N. arms inspectors. If the Democratic Presidential contenders really believe in this "imminence" standard, then by all means let's have a debate about it all the way through November 2004. Their political opportunism on Iraq aside, we doubt that in a post 9/11 world the American public will want their President to wait to defend this country until he sees the whites of Mohammed Atta's eyes. URL for this article: online.wsj.com