It's a sad measure of the state of American journalism today that the conventional, unimaginative David Broder is known as the "dean" of political columnists.
But one thing about Broder's columns: once he floats an interpretation of an issue, there's a good chance it's already become conventional wisdom among all but the stodgiest of political analysts.
In Sunday's column, he addresses the current status of the Iraq War as an issue in the campaign, which is largely how it's appeared in our press the last month and a half or so: Bush's Two Albatrosses Washington Post 08/15/04. (No, he doesn't mean Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.)
My friend David in his comments to an earlier post wrote:
... WMDs or not, a very plausible case can be made on a number of grounds that the Saddam Hussein regime should have been destroyed (preferably in 1991). When his trial begins in a few months time these reasons will be made very clear to all who are willing to listen. Over the long-term the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime will be seen to be a great blessing to the world, starting with the Iraqi people of course.
Patrick of Patrick's Place in a post of 08/15/04 expresses a similar view, at least as far as the missing "weapons of mass destruction":
I honestly don't have a problem with Kerry saying he still would have voted to authorize military force. Just because we haven't found [WMDs] doesn't mean that they were never there.
Broder's Sunday column is an indication that it's finally dawned on the the Big Pundits what most Americans have been thinking for a while. Which is that it does matter whether or not the cause for war is legitimate when we're sending our soldiers off to war to kill and be killed, and to come home with parts of their bodies missing:
From World War I right through the Persian Gulf War, the United States had never initiated hostilities or invaded a major country without the provocation of an attack from that country on this nation or its allies. Bush changed that by announcing a new doctrine of "preemptive war" and applying it first to Iraq. Iraq was a military dictatorship with a horrible record of human rights abuse and a well-earned reputation as an international malefactor that had attacked its neighbors.
But the urgency that Bush cited for moving against Saddam Hussein was the threat he posed by his possession of chemical and biological weapons and his pursuit of nuclear arms. "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant," Bush said in his major domestic speech justify- ing the war. "If we know that Saddam Hus- sein has dangerous weapons today -- and we do -- does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?"
Long after Hussein was defeated and captured, the American forces occupying Iraq have found no evidence of the supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The rationale for a war that has taken nearly 1,000 American lives, caused several thousand American casualties and cost well over $100 billion does not exist.
Both defenders of Bush's war in Iraq as well as critics might quibble over whether some of our military actions since the Second World War (Dominican Republican, Grenada, Haiti, Panama) exactly fit Broder's definition of responding to threats. But we can't expect too much from the Dean of the Big Pundits.
It's also worth remembering, as the Dean mentions but does not emphasize, that it was the supposed threat of Saddam's nuclear weapons program that was by far the scariest of the prewar claims. And the one that was most persuasive to Congress. That's a big reason the administration went to such literally criminal lengths to try to retaliate against Joseph Wilson through his wife Valerie Plame for casting doubt on the truthfulness of the administration's claims on that point.
Yes, it makes a difference that the case for war was false. And whether Bush was being deliberately deceptive or gullible is not a central concern. Was he dishonest in pushing for war, or "only" irresponsible? The end result was the same. We went to war to get WMDs that weren't there.
And, yes, it's true that most everyone assumed prewar that Saddam had some chemical or biological weapons still available. But there were plenty of people who questioned the presiden'ts false claims before the invasion. And there were plenty of people who thought that what "WMDs" he was thought to have were not a threat sufficient to justify war. My own belief, then and now, is that neither Bush nor most of his advisers cared. They had determined to go to war with Iraq, and they did.
War is very serious business and always involves risks. Invading and occupying Iraq involved big risks. We've seen some of them playing out over the last week, and by this time next week we may have seen many more.
The war supporters are pretty much left with the argument that Saddam was a bad guy, even though that was not the reason most people who supported this particular invasion did so. The specific requirement laid out in the Congressional war resolution did not make "Saddam is a bad ruler" sufficient cause for war.
That might be a tad more persuasive as retroactive justification if we hadn't seen what was going on in Abu Ghuraib during the occupation. No, I don't think that George Bush and Dick Cheney lay awake at nights wondering about the poor suffering Iraqi people under Saddam.
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