The Shock That Wasn't

“No one can now doubt the word of America.” It sounds like the punch line of a macabre joke after the WMD-related developments of the last few weeks, but Bush made this triumphal assertion in his State of the Union address a month ago. Five days after the speech, David Kay concluded that the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Bush appointed him to find apparently did not exist. Twelve days after that, in a speech at Georgetown, CIA chief George Tenet averred that his agency had never told the president that Hussein posed an “imminent threat” to the world. The president’s approval rating plunged in the week after Kay’s “we were almost all wrong” pronouncement—briefly dropping below fifty percent for the first time—and the White House is still scrambling to put out the political fire. And after all, isn’t it just schockin? It turns out the administration distorted evidence—nay!—turned a blind eye to the lack of evidence supporting its claims! I, for one, have not been so utterly taken by surprise since Britney Spears announced that she wasn’t really a virgin. No, the pundits can say what they want about Bush’s shattered “credibility”, but like the emperor and his clothes, the president never really had any to begin with. Credibility, that is.

Long before David Kay took over in Iraq, before President Bush even gave the order to invade, teams of international weapons inspectors, led by Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei, spent months scouring Iraq for signs of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, or programs for producing them, and turned up nothing. In an interview a few months after the war, Blix commented pointedly, ‘’What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons. I don’t see how they could have come to such an attitude if they had, at any time, studied the [inspectors’] reports.” The president is trying to pass off this discrepancy between reality and his prewar claims as a failure of the intelligence community. (The commission he recently appointed has been charged to investigate this so-called intelligence failure.) In doing so, he has deflected attention from the real question: Why did his administration continue to claim that Saddam possessed WMD after inspectors on the ground came up empty-handed?

It would indeed be reprehensible if—as Tenet’s testimony suggests—the White House deliberately exaggerated the caveat-laden reports it received from intelligence agencies before the war. But one thing is certain: when the president decided to invade Iraq in March, declaring, “the Iraqi regime will be disarmed by force” because it had “not disarmed itself,” intensive inspections had yielded no evidence that the regime actually had any WMD of which to disarm itself. Nor were the Iraqis resisting the inspectors: on March 8, two weeks before the war began, Blix reported to the Security Council that the Iraqi regime had “started the process of destruction,” of its conventional Al Samoud missiles. Blix also noted the “significant Iraqi effort underway to clarify a major source of uncertainty as to the quantities of biological and chemical weapons which were unilaterally destroyed in 1991,” and reported that inspectors “faced relatively few difficulties” in accessing potential weapons-production sites. The problem, from the hawks’ perspective, was that all this disarmament was getting in the way of regime change. Clearly such cooperation could not be allowed to stand!

This is the real credibility issue: the administration’s unwarranted abandonment of inspections flew in the face of its previous assurances that war was not a foregone conclusion. In his Feb. 8 interview with Tim Russert, President Bush justified his decision, explaining that, had he not invaded Iraq, the world would “look at us and say, they don’t mean what they say, they are not willing to follow through.” It’s funny he should mention that. That is essentially what the world community has been saying since he prematurely ended the inspections—without regard to the impressive progress made by Blix and El Baradei or the cooperation of the Iraqis—after promising that the U.S. would only resort to war if inspections failed.

Going back on our word like this can only weaken America’s ability to make credible promises in the future. That prospect may not trouble the president, but empty promises are as dangerous as empty threats. Either way, our enemies know that it makes little difference to our military decisions whether they choose to be cooperative or belligerent. So why cooperate? To end up like Saddam “I Opened My Country to Inspectors and All I Got Was This Lousy Spider Hole” Hussein? No thanks!

I’m sure the president was disappointed to announce that the commission’s report—and any embarrassing revelations it may contain—will not be released until March 2005, after the elections. But we already know that Bush launched a war that he had failed to justify—that was never a secret to begin with. You have to hand it to him: Bush’s most egregiously dishonest actions are the ones he is most upfront about.

Eoghan W. Stafford ’06 is a Social Studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alernate Wednesdays.