Glenn Kessler's article on Iraqi WMDs in Monday's Washington Post (01/19/04) is titled Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility Abroad.
Gosh, you think?
Kessler recalls some of the scary claims Bush made about Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" in last year's State of the Union address, pointing out that the failure to find them contrasts dramatically with the claims on which the Iraq War was based.
You know the saying about rats deserting a sinking ship? One of the best-known neoconservative publicists is Kenneth Adelman, who was hyping the Iraq War for all it worth just a year ago. Kessler catches up with Adelman now:
"The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.
The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid."
It almost makes me feel ill to my stomach to see a guy like Adelman saying something like this. He's right. But if he has a word of reflection about the role rabid war fans like himself played in the build-up to war that has damaged American credibility so badly, it didn't make it into this article.
But the man his admirers call the Prince of Darkness sees no need for reflection:
Richard Perle, another member of the Defense Advisory Board, said the criticism of the Bush administration is unfair. "Intelligence is not an audit," he said. "It's the best information you can get in circumstances of uncertainty, and you use it to make the best prudent judgment you can."
He added that presidents in particular tend not to place qualifiers on their statements, especially when they are advocating a particular policy. "Public officials tend to avoid hedging," he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment