QandO

June 21, 2004

It's all W's Fault
Posted by Dale Franks

After reading today's article by Leon Wieseltier, the Literary Editor for The New Republic, I am a bit confused. Or, maybe it's Leon who's a bit confused. The first paragraph of the article starts off with this:

If I had known that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I would not have supported this war. I am not embarrassed by my assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed the sort of arsenal that made him a clear and present danger: The alarming intelligence estimates were shared by many Western governments, so that the debate in the months preceding the war concerned the methods for disarming Iraq, not the reasons for disarming it...

OK, so what he's saying is, that, since practically everybody believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and all the intelligence estimates agreed that he was, and actively seeking more, it was reasonable, if mistaken, to believe that Saddam did, in fact, have WMDs, and was seeking more of them.

Unless, of course, your name is George W. Bush, as he makes clear in the second paragraph. Then, it's just unforgivable sloppiness.

Strategic thinking must have an empirical foundation. You do not act against a threat for which there is little or no evidence. Yet that is precisely what the United States did. Saddam Hussein had no nuclear capability, and almost no nuclear program. If there is an adequate explanation for the disposition of his vast and documented hoard of chemical and biological weapons, I have not heard it...The arsenal that we said was there is not there. Whatever the merits of preemption, there was nothing to preempt. It really is as plain as that. An absence of regrets and recriminations on the part of a supporter of this war now amounts to an absence of intellectual honesty...The administration is reaping an alienation that it sowed...Whether or not the president lied, he was not speaking the truth. He justified this war to the American people in a manner that will make it difficult for a long time to come to justify almost any war to the American people. In a time of genuine crisis, in a world riddled with savage enmity toward America and Americans, he was sloppy with our trust.

So, it was reasonable when Leon believed it, but it was sloppy when W believed it? So, what, I guess W should have used his amazing psychic powers to divine the truth?

You can't have it both ways. Both Para 1 and Para 2 cannot simultaneously be true. If it was reasonable for Leon to believe, based on past experience and the actions of Saddam Hussein in thwarting inspections that there was a smoking gun, then it was reasonable for W to believe this to. It now appears they were both wrong.

That may have been a mistake, but it wasn't sloppiness. It was, after all, Saddam Hussein who refused to allow the UN unfettered access to his scientific people after UN Res. 1441 forced inspections to begin again. If there was any sloppiness, then it was Saddam Hussein's. Saddam could've prevented an invasion at any time simply by opening his books to the UN.

Instead, he acted in a way that convinced Mr. Wieseltier that he had an active WMD program. Unfortunately for Saddam, it convinced W, too. This offends Mr. Wieseltier, which strikes me as an overly tendentious position.

The rest of the article is similarly incoherent.

Wieseltier argues that liberating Iraq is a grand and noble experiment in bringing freedom to a repressed corner of the world. But it might not work, and the Iraqis might prefer something else.

This leaves the other justification for the war, the ennobling one. I say this without irony, and I refer to the democratization of Iraq. I can imagine no grander historical experiment in our time than the effort to bring a liberal order to an Arab society...

Still, some murmurings are in order. It is important to remember that freedom is not the same thing as democracy. When people are liberated, they become free to be what they already are. They almost never are already a democracy. Democracy is an elaborate structure of principles and institutions. It is built, not found. The liberation of Iraq is only a condition for the democratization of Iraq. Finally the fate of Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis. If Iraq becomes a theocracy, or succumbs to a strongman, or collapses as a state, all this, too, will be the work of a free Iraq.

So, does this mean that if the Iraqis choose to do something different than we hope, it wasn't a noble experiment? So, should we force them to create a democratic, Jeffersonian republic? Or what? Does he even have a point, other than, if the Iraqis don't come up with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton tout de suite, that W should be put in a bamboo cage and poked with sharp sticks?

Apparently not.

I love the final 'graph, too:

Though the president and the vice president are acting with force internationally, they are not exactly internationalists. They are not national greatness conservatives, they are national smallness conservatives. But who are the national greatness liberals?

I especially like that last line. Because that is the heart of the problem. The National Greatness Liberals, if Mr. Wieseltier is an example, want America to act forcefully in the world, but only as long as no one is offended, our allies all agree with us, and we don't make any serious blunders, never mind that serious blunders are a part and parcel of warfare, and always have been. This is essentially a prescription for doing absolutely nothing, until an atomic bomb blows up in Chicago, or Botulinum toxin is released into San Francisco's water supply. Maybe then the French will give us permission to defend our own interests.

If this is Mr. Wieseltier's--and the Left's--idea of national greatness, then I'll take W's national smallness, thanks.

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