Abstract
David Kay's report on the search for weapons of mass destruction was due to be delivered “in September.” Late in the month, efforts were being made to spin the obvious meaning of the still-pending report, that the administration's stated reason for war was–not to put too fine a point on it–a crock.
Whether any of Kay's conclusions beyond a cheerful “still looking” would be conveyed to the public was unknown. He had a date to report secretly to Congress, and as Condoleez-za Rice, the Bush bellwether of bad news, said a few days earlier of what was now being described as a series of progress reports by Kay, “I don't know what the public nature of them will be.”
Not having had the foresight to pre-position weapons to be conveniently found later, the administration now says it never expected to find them in the first place. Why did Americans think otherwise? They apparently misheard or misinterpreted everything their government said between September 2002 and, let's say, just to be safe, yesterday.
If the occupation were going well, if Iraqis loved being invaded and were properly grateful to be receiving American largess, the public might be more willing to forgive.
But unsurprisingly, Americans have begun to see the outcome of the neo-cons' glorious adventure: Iraq had nothing to do with the struggle against terrorism, but will continue to divert attention from unfinished business in Afghanistan and elsewhere. American soldiers will continue to be picked off in guerrilla attacks. The “rebuilding phase” seems likely to drag on for years, easily slowed by systematic sabotage. And the staggering costs–$78 billion here, another $87 billion there–will eventually endanger even the most modest of domestic goals. As a result, the public has opted out of the administration's belief in easy conquest.
Though they think of themselves as their generation's best and brightest, the architects of the Bush foreign policy agenda have not yet learned the basic lessons of this first (and one hopes, last) real-life test of their peculiar ideology–that they have failed and that they are wrong. Nor have they grasped that they have seriously wounded American credibility abroad, and may have sent the country into a downward economic spiral that will transform the word “superpower” into an ironic joke.
Don't fail to read “Neocons: The Men Behind the Curtain,” by Khur-ram Husain (page 62), for the back story on their ideas.
The same folks who brought you Iraq, the quagmire–the would-be World Dominators (and, I suppose, a World Dominatrix or two)–also want to have, eventually, nukes in space to enable them to strike nearly instantaneously, anywhere on Earth, day or night, with a literal bolt-from-the-blue. Mike Moore explains it all in “Space Cops,” page 46.
And while we're on the subject of ill-conceived ideas, December 8, 2003 is the fiftieth anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's “Atoms for Peace” speech, which inaugurated a program of encouragement to nuclear wannabes to build bombs under cover of peaceful power programs. Much of the resulting proliferation is only now coming to fruition. Leonard Weiss tells the story (page 34), and we ask “Atoms for What?” in the Center Spread, page 42.