Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2004
Somebody, please tell Dick Cheney to put on some clothes. Like the butt-naked emperor of the fairy tale, the Vice President is on a sweep through Europe asking for help in Iraq, at the same time as insisting that the Iraq invasion had maintained U.S. credibility: "There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are," Cheney told a polite but skeptical audience of power brokers at Davos. "At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. At that point, we must show that beyond our resolutions is actual resolve."
Cheney's John Wayne posturing — "direct threats require decisive action" — suggests that he must think the Europeans hadn't noticed that the Bush administration has been forced to concede that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The "gathering danger" of which Cheney continues to speak was but a phantom menace. When the fall of Saddam's regime and the occupation of Iraq had failed to reveal the massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of which the Bush team had warned — nor the nuclear weapons program that Cheney insisted had been reconstituted — the Bushies insisted that given time, they would provide the evidence to back up the extravagant prewar claims of the unconventional weapons threat from Iraq. Last week, however, they appeared to quietly give up the ghost. David Kay, the CIA weapons inspector put in charge of the hunt by the Bush administration quit, told National Public Radio that Iraq had no stockpiles of banned weapons when the war began last March.
Some in the administration, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, graciously acknowledged the egg on their faces. Powell sheepishly told reporters aboard his plane that his indictment of Iraq at the UN Security Council a year ago was based on what U.S. intelligence believed to be true at the time — a prospect rendered rather frightening by rereading Powell's presentation, widely hailed at the time as making the most credible case for war, of which remarkably little bears up. Indeed, a comprehensive analysis of the fate of various prewar claims by the British American Security Information Council (
http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Research/2004WMD3.htm#01) suggests that Bush and Blair may have done better to listen more carefully to chief UN weapons inspector Dr. Hans Blix. The UN never actually claimed that Iraq still had stockpiles of banned weapons; merely that it had not provided the evidence to vouch for its claim to have destroyed all of those weapons. Treated like an ineffectual appeaser by most of the US media before the war, Blix suddenly looks like the only one who had it right and quite a few publications, and politicians, owe him an apology.
Kay's comments, of course, are a refreshing departure for a man, who as Slate's Fred Kaplan notes, had mastered the art while still under contract had of building castles out of thin air, artfully choosing his words to allow administration sound-bite authors to imply that WMD evidence was imminent. Kay did, of course, do his former employers the service of trying to pin the blame for going to war under false pretenses onto the CIA. That seems to be the White House fallback position, too, although Press Secretary Scott McClellan gamely suggests that Kay's conclusion may be "premature" — in other words, don't expect us to confirm the obvious until after November.
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/karon/article/0,9565,583859,00.html
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