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COMMENTARY
February 4, 2004
Making it worse
When something bad has happened possibilities for making it worse will immediately appear. This is especially the case in politics. The lethal wound is rarely administered by a politician's enemies; it is usually done to himself in response to some unexpected or embarrassing event. What makes this week so memorable is the spectacle of U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair trumping bad news by trying to commit a kind of ritual sepuku. (My own hope is that neither of them succeeds.) The "something bad" -- politically bad strategically indifferent -- was the discovery by David Kay and the U.S.-British Iraq Survey that Saddam Hussein left no media-demonstrable weapons of mass destruction -- narrowly defined as current stocks of fissile biological or chemical materials. What Saddam did have (a lot of paper plans) and what he thought he had (the means to repel an American invasion) were extraordinary enough. What he got rid of and can't yet be traced also remains interesting. Mr. Kay's large mission whose work will be continued under Charles Duelfer (a veteran of Iraqi inspections from the 1990s) has given us a window into a political regime like none we ever peered into before -- a paranoid kleptocracy on an unprecedented scale. In retrospect we can now see the regime created the perfect shell game -- one in which every part of the regime believed all the other parts were lethally armed when in fact none of them were. And quite literally billions of dollars for "WMD" disappeared without trace. What could we learn from this? Nothing that a public inquiry could possibly tell us. The Western intelligence services -- not only the Americans and British but all the other significant players including the French and Germans -- were fooled the same way Saddam was fooled by himself. Neither I nor anyone clever that I know can think of a way in which the allies might have found the whole truth before invading. But to the world's Bush-haters and anti-Americans who are extremely numerous the ideas that some things are unknowable and that a plausible threat requires a response will not wash as arguments. They demand omniscience from the people they hate and will shamelessly characterize anything short of omniscience as a lie. Meanwhile back in Washington the secretary of state Colin Powell has committed what appears to me an act of treason against the administration he was hired to serve. Asked by the press if he would have recommended invasion knowing what the administration knows now he said The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus. It changes the answer you get, the formula I laid out. In other words no. Now there were many reasons to invade Iraq as and when the allies did including centrally the need to effect profound political change in the Middle Eastern region. This had everything to do with removing the threat of Islamist terrorism which has been able to use the cover of virulently anti-Western regimes. Unfortunately thanks in no small part to Mr. Powell and his determination to get United Nations backing for the Iraq invasion the technical argument against Saddam's illegal WMD was instead put front and centre. (Mr. Kay's researches did prove Iraq was in massive violation of the U.N. resolutions incidentally beyond doubt.) The strategy has proved disastrous after the fact; and for Mr. Powell to now disown the mess he played so large a part in creating is unspeakable. Especially as he knows President Bush can't afford to sack him in an election year. It is in the same kind of political bind that Mr. Bush is now announcing a public inquiry into the "intelligence failure" that was not a failure (for the intelligence agencies discerned a risk that was very real). Mr. Blair has announced a parallel inquiry on the other side of the Atlantic under the same kind of pressure. While these may reduce the heat for a moment they are almost certain to explode later. For what both political leaders have failed to do is stare the truth down: to tell their peoples plainly that they would have deposed Saddam even knowing what they know now and why they would have done so. (It is indeed something they should have begun explaining before the invasion began; but that would have required more foresight than is granted to any normal politician.) By failing to do this they leave the WMD issue in the middle of the table where it can not only continue to be exploited by their domestic political opponents in a hundred different ways but also continue to damage the credibility of their respective countries. Worse the inquiries will actually delay such changes as must be made in response to what has been discovered. They will throw the CIA and other agencies into a panic of bureaucratic self-protection when they have a job to get on with (ricin anyone?). They could easily blow open Western spycraft to the world's media and thus to terrorists. This will demoralize everyone who was fighting on Mr. Bush's side. The war on terror is proceeding into the high political season and the command is going squirrelly in response. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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