The New Yorker, MIGHT AND RIGHT,
by Philip
Gourevitch, June 9, 2003
Two weeks ago, on the first day of his first foreign
trip since the fall of Baghdad, President Bush went to Auschwitz. The symbolism
could not have been more heavy-handed: with the international press full of
images of the grisly excavations of Saddam Hussein’s killing fields, the
President claimed the memory of the six million to explain his “war on terror,”
invoking the Nazi gas chambers and crematoriums as “a sobering reminder of the
power of evil and the need for people to resist evil.” Bush ended his trip in
the same spirit, telling a cheering throng of American troops in Qatar, “The
world is now learning what many of you have seen. They’re learning about the
mass graves. They’re learning about the torture chambers. Because of you, a
great evil has been ended.” It’s true that stopping Saddam’s tyranny is
the most heartening and unambiguous consequence of the war in Iraq. But Bush did
not take over that country on a humanitarian impulse. As Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has said, although Saddam’s “criminal treatment of
the Iraqi people” was a “fundamental concern” for Washington’s war
planners, it was “not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk,
certainly not on the scale we did it.” Rather, according to the repeated
claims of the Administration, our kids were put at risk in order to disarm Iraq
of its chemical and biological weapons, which, intelligence assessments were
said to show, posed an urgent threat to our national security.
So where is Saddam’s terrible arsenal? Bush, on his way to Auschwitz,
took time out to tell Polish television, “We found the weapons of mass
destruction.” That wasn’t true. After more than two months of searching,
American forces in Iraq had yet to discover any trace of biological or chemical
agents. All they have found is a pair of tractor trailers, which appear to have
been fitted out as weapons laboratories but never used. The President’s
readiness to present this discovery as a finding of the weapons themselves
follows a pattern of distortions on the part of the Administration—hypotheticals
proclaimed as facts, suspicions and fears spun as clear and present dangers,
actions taken accordingly—throughout the planning, marketing, and prosecution
of the war.
Why, exactly, are we in Iraq? Regardless of whether one supported or
opposed the war, one cannot escape the impression that the weapons, some of
which may yet be found, were a pretext for a campaign whose larger motives and
purposes the Administration has never seen fit to articulate to the public. As
the war drags on, a sense of reality is lacking in the Bush camp’s
triumphalism; Americans are still killing and dying in almost every news cycle,
and Iraqi resentment is mounting against an improvised occupation that has set
the nation free mainly in the sense that it is ungoverned. Against this
background, the charges now circulating that Bush’s war cabinet depended on
false or, worse, falsified intelligence to exaggerate the threat of those
weapons in the first place is much more than a technicality.
The press reports are damning. The Washington Post
quotes C.I.A. analysts complaining that they felt steady pressure from
Vice-President Dick Cheney, from Wolfowitz, and from their own boss, George
Tenet, to amplify the danger of Iraq. The Times has
picked up the thread of reporting in this magazine by Seymour M. Hersh about the
Pentagon’s creation of its own intelligence organ, with the apparent purpose
of producing the sort of allegations about Iraqi weapons and links to terrorists
that C.I.A. analysts would not supply. U.S. News &
World Report describes how Secretary of State Colin Powell, before he
made the Administration’s case against Iraq to the United Nations Security
Council, rejected as weak and insubstantial intelligence material prepared for
him by Cheney’s office. At one point, Powell reportedly threw the
Vice-President’s pages in the air and said, “I’m not reading this. This is
bullshit.” The historical precedent that these reëxaminations suggest is not,
as the President would prefer, the Second World War but the Tonkin Gulf affair
of 1964, when an alarmist report of an unconfirmed attack against an American
warship in the South China Sea served Lyndon Johnson’s White House as a
pretext for an escalation of the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, in London, Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing the fury of
both sides of the aisle in Parliament over his claim before the war that he had
intelligence showing that Saddam’s chemical agents were weaponized and could
be deployed at just forty-five minutes’ notice. “It is about the gravest
accusation that can be made in politics,” the Daily
Telegraph, which strongly supported the war, wrote. “Blair stands
charged, in effect, with committing British troops on the basis of a lie.”
Both the Prime Minister and the President have indignantly dismissed the
suggestion that they hyped—or, as the British put it, “sexed up”—the
case for war, and both have said that with a bit more time the truth will out.
In London, the outing will be done by Parliament, which has compelled Blair to
submit to a full inquiry into the use and possible abuse of intelligence
reporting in the buildup to the war. Americans should be prepared for a similar
investigation, if Congress can muster the courage and the clarity to command it.
Because Bush launched his reëlection campaign shortly after the marines pulled
down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, any public excavation of the
Administration’s drive to war is bound to be fraught with partisan politics.
But, in a country where the previous President’s lies about consensual
adulterous relations were considered ground for impeachment, truthtelling about
the gravest affair of state—the waging of war—must stand as a paramount
value.
A few days after Bush toured Auschwitz, the Pew Research Center released
a survey of international opinion, canvassed from some twenty countries, which
found that “the war has widened the rift between Americans and Western
Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on
terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of
the post-World War II era—the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance.” And the
war in Iraq is far from over. What is at stake there, and in the war against
terrorism of which it is but a chapter, is the nature of America’s standing as
the defining power of our age. We are told that we went into Iraq to make the
world safer, yet, even as the remaining members of Bush’s axis of evil, Iran
and North Korea, pursue nuclear-arms programs, many of the countries that allied
with us against Saddam are wondering if they were falsely led. Nobody can regret
that Saddam is gone. But, in the unipolar world that the Bush Administration
seems bent on forging, our security will depend as much on our credibility as on
our physical might.
THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE