A rchive Date
[ 18-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/harris.html
Weapon of mass distraction
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For The Ottawa Sun
July 18, 2003
"The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open." The words do not belong to me, but to the great novelist Gunter Grass.
Ever since 9/11, all too many people have had their mouths firmly closed, mistaking blind faith with loyalty and belligerent jingoism with patriotism. The worm is beginning to turn and in the most important of places, the United States.
For the first time since George W. Bush and his advisers elbowed their way into Iraq over the objections of most of the world, more Americans now believe the White House "overestimated" Iraq's weapons of mass destruction than those who still think the administration had it right.
Also for the first time, less than a majority of Americans say that the war would still be worth the terrible costs if such weapons were never found, down from 56% who believed the opposite in May. (In Britain, two-thirds of the people polled by the Daily Mirror believe that Prime Minister Tony Blair misled them over the Iraq threat.)
Even President Bush, who apparently prays each week that foreign affairs and not the economy will top the public agenda, has seen a dramatic weakening in his approval rating from Americans, down from 67% in June to 59% today. The Iraq adventure is no longer a universal antidote to a miserable economy.
Driving the political tailspin of George of Iraq and his principal ally is what the British press is calling the "artificial intelligence" that somehow got into this year's State of the Union message. There was no basis for the president to declare that Iraq had recently been trying to buy "yellow cake" from Niger for its nuclear weapons program. Log-cabin Republicans say that such caviling about the president's admitted error will soon disappear.
Perhaps. The world suffers from attention deficit hyper activity disorder and public issues have the shortest of shelf lives. But good citizens will never let that happen without an accounting. As a 25-year-old business consultant told the New York Times this week, "When you are taking lives, it should be nothing but the truth. We rushed in there." For the first time, the voice of those who want the president to account for what is being called a pattern of deceit about Iraq outnumber those who see George W. Bush as a kind of pre-shrunk John Wayne out there doing God's and America's work with other people's sons and daughters.
Although it is by no means clear that President Bush purposely cooked the intelligence to advance the optics for a war he wanted, he and his administration are not acting like people who made an innocent mistake. The president has used the Republican majority in the Congress to ensure, so far, that any inquiry into what he knew and when he knew it about false intelligence, will be held in secret. (For that matter, even those federal commissions investigating what the administration knew about the 9/11 attacks are complaining that they can't get basic documents from the Pentagon and the U.S. Justice Department.)
Nor has the president looked credible in his defence of a grievous error that cost thousands of people their lives and $4 billion a month for the U.S. occupation of Iraq at a time when the American economy is a stagnant pool of corporate corruption and record unemployment.
How credible can it be for Mr. Bush to blame the director of the Central Intelligence Agency for the inclusion of false information in the State of the Union address, when the same man, George J. Tenet, was the one who prevented the president from including the same allegations in a speech in Cincinnati months before the State of the Union address?
Something else doesn't quite add up in the president's version of how a crudely forged document conveying false information became one of the bulwarks in the Bush case for invading Iraq. If George Tenet had failed so miserably in his duty atop the richest intelligence agency in the world, if, that is, he couldn't see the difference between the real thing and a crude counterfeit and then allowed the president to use it to mislead Americans, why isn't he standing in an unemployment line? At the very least, why wasn't he publicly dressed down by the man he allegedly embarrassed? Instead, a discredited president praises the allegedly bungling Tenet and expressly conveys his confidence in him and the CIA. That would be like Enron's board giving Ken Lay a raise.
Up until this point in his presidency, Bush has been judged on the quality of his actions and there have been a lot of them on the international scene, including three wars in just one term. But from this point forward to the presidential elections of 2004, he will be judged not on the quality of his actions alone, but on the credibility of his answers about a raft of misgivings about George's America.
Is it American values to sell a war on nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction and then argue that the end justifies the means when the charges and the threat prove baseless? Is it American values to conduct congressional investigations in secret? Is it American values to defy a court order, as the U.S. Justice Department has done, to prevent alleged al-Qaida member Zacarias Moussaoui from calling a material witness in his death-penalty case? And for that matter, is it American values for the Bush administration to try "enemy combatants" outside both the country's civil and military courts, when it could have asked Congress to publicly pass new anti-terrorism legislation instead of setting up what The Economist calls "a shadow court system outside the reach of either Congress or America's judiciary"?
When a government operates in secret, there is a secret. What is the secret of George W. Bush?
Author, broadcaster and investigative journalist Michael Harris can be heard Monday to Thursday, 1-3 p.m. on 580 CFRA. Letters to the editor should be sent to oped@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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