Abstract
Personal courage being the hallmark of current policy-makers, on July 24 Vice President Dick Cheney braved an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) audience in an effort to silence critics of the administration's “preventive” attack on Iraq. The Iraqi threat could not be ignored, he told the no-doubt-obstreperous crowd. That would have been “irresponsible in the extreme.” Of course, no one was unruly enough to point out that on March 16 Cheney argued for war because Iraq already had “reconstituted nuclear weapons,” but by the time he reached AEI, his story had changed. The White House had gone to war based on a report that said, “If left unchecked, it [Iraq] probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”
Cheney's years-long revision in the rationale for the invasion of Iraq is typical of the meltdown of evidence, the endless do-overs on the question of the “imminent threat.” And necessarily so: As John Prados points out in “Will the Real Revisionists Please Stand Up?” on page 21, three months after President George W. Bush's declaration of the end of combat in Iraq, U.S. teams had searched hundreds of sites fingered by the administration as repositories of instant death, but none–not one–of the many weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was said to have had at the ready could be found.
To offer a lesser example of hype, had officials not said that Iraq was building missiles that defied the range set by the United Nations, but cited actual distances instead–revealing that the Al-Samoud had been souped up to go 110 rather than 90-some miles–would the risk have seemed so urgent?
Meanwhile, the White Collar Corps is turning to other countries whose governments annoy its members, and Congress has so far determined that any meaningful questions it asks about the strange case of Iraq will remain behind closed doors.
Americans do not deserve this imperial behavior. We deserve, at a minimum, the truth. As I have argued in more detail (on the Bulletin Web site), if Congress will not do so, Americans should investigate for themselves how it came about that they were misled by public officials, that the opposition party failed in its duty to consent or disagree based on careful judgment rather than political calculus, and that the mainstream media muffed its basic reportorial obligation.
Luckily, the case of Iraq is uniquely suited for public inquiry. An extraordinary amount of information about Iraq's weapons was available before the war; after all, Iraq had been closely watched and extensively reported on for more than a decade. It is entirely possible to compare the administration's prewar claims with the prewar public record to see which was more likely to be accurate at the time, and to do so without secret or classified information, tugs-of-war over the release of sensitive documents, smoking guns, or whistle-blowing government employees. It would simply require the participation of the appropriate non-government-affiliated experts and the exercise of common sense.
We at the Bulletin would like to find like-minded groups and individuals who could help make a hearing possible. If you agree that a public hearing is in the public interest, and would like to help in any way–but especially by making a tax-free contribution to such a hearing–please contact me.