Bright shining lies / No more of them on Iraq
Following Monday's series of deadly attacks in Iraq -- notable only for the number of people killed and injured -- President Bush held a news conference to declare that the United States won't be intimidated into leaving. It will stay in Iraq until its job is done, he said. And of course he's right; leaving Iraq early would be disastrous.
But very few people, including most critics of Bush's policy in Iraq, are advocating a U.S. withdrawal. What bothers them -- and should bother all Americans -- is the continuing inability of U.S. forces and their allies to bring security and peace to Iraq. What bothers them is the continuing failure to outline a sound plan for Iraq's future and a reasonable time line for implementing it. What bothers them is the continuing internal war within the Bush administration over just what it should do in Iraq.
The principal justification for going to war in Iraq was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world. Some say the administration did not assert an "imminent" threat. In so many words, perhaps not, but it strongly and repeatedly implied such a threat. This was, the administration said, a "preemptive" war. The choice of that descriptor is telling; it wasn't a "preventive" war. It sought to preempt Iraqi action against the United States. Time was of the essence; U.N. weapons inspectors couldn't have months more time to search for the Iraqi WMD stores and programs.
Now the search for WMD, especially Iraqi nuclear capabilities, has been all but abandoned. Nothing has been found. Experts working for the man directing the search, David Kay, have concluded that Saddam Hussein did not reconstitute his nuclear programs after the 1991 Gulf War. It now appears the U.S. decision to go to war came first, followed by an effort to find intelligence to justify it. Anything that seemed to help was accepted uncritically and hyped; information that didn't help was ignored.
With the disappearance of the WMD-threat assertion, the prime administration explanation for war has become the need to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and liberate the region from Saddam's bullying, corrosive influence.
But with the change in justification also comes a change in how the effort is judged. Americans most likely would accept the daily loss of American lives if its soldiers were, indeed, eliminating a horrific terrorist threat to the United States. It becomes much more difficult to justify expending those lives just so the Iraqi people can have a better life -- especially in the absence of evidence that the Bush administration has an effective plan for providing that better life and bringing its troops home.
Americans also continue to die in Afghanistan, for example, and the American people understand why: They are still chasing Osama Bin Laden and others in Al-Qaida who killed almost 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and could kill more if not stopped.
Iraq's different. It didn't attack the United States or pose a demonstrable threat. It was simply ruled by a ruthless dictator.
Imagine for a moment that it's not Iraq we're talking about but Zimbabwe, or Burma, or a dozen other countries run by tyrants. We're losing several soldiers almost every day, and we're spending tens of billions of dollars, and the occupation is going from bad to worse, but, by golly, the people of Zimbabwe finally are free.
Would the American people be anxious? Would they be critical? Would they be impatient? You bet they would, and with more than ample reason.
That's the situation in Iraq. Hundreds of young Americans and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in this war, and for what? Yes, Iraqis are free, sort of, but they're not safe. Saddam hasn't been found. The suicide bombers haven't been stopped.
So don't tell the American people, as Bush did, that the continuing attacks actually show U.S. success. Don't give them up-is-down information like the phony-baloney numbers and charts that Robert McNamara used to prove the war in Vietnam was going well. That was, as Neil Sheehan wrote, "A Bright Shining Lie." The American people don't need any more lies.