Month: April 2003

Why does Bush have to find weapons of mass destruction? Because that’s how he justified the war.

Exhibit A: the State of the Union. There is a sequence of 19 paragraphs directly discussing Iraq, beginning with the line “Our nation and the world must learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq,” and ending with “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm, for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

Of those 19 paragraphs, 18 of them refer to the threat Saddam poses and/or the weapons of mass destruction he possesses. 4 of them discuss Saddam’s brutality towards his own people.

Exhibt B: the Iraqi Threat speech, which admittedly aimed at discussing the threat Iraq poses. Still, it’s significant that he chose to discuss the threat, rather than the need to bring freedom to the citizens of Iraq. Surely if the issue of rights and freedom were his primary concern, he’d have discussed those?

In any case, out of 48 paragraphs, 4 paragraphs discuss the repression of the Iraqi people. You can probably guess what the other 44 deal with.

Exhibit C: the ultimatum, delivered on March 16th. 27 paragraphs; we’re 14 paragraphs in before we hit any comments on the oppression of the Iraqi people. Sum total of discussion of said oppression: 3 paragraphs, maybe 4 if you’re inclined towards a liberal interpretation.

Exhibit D: the Iraqi Freedom speech, which was delivered on March 19th as the bombing began. It opens with the statement, “My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Two out of three motivations relate to the weapons of mass destruction.

Later, he says “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly — yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

If you can’t take the President’s word on what the purpose of the war was, whose word can you take?

None of this should be taken to imply that I’m not happy Iraq is potentially free. I say potentially because anyone who says they know what the place will look like in a year is lying; a lot depends on us and a lot depends on whether various Iraqi groups decide to work towards democracy or not. Regardless, I’m quite happy that Saddam has been overthrown.

However, when my President tells me we’re going to war for a purpose, I expect that purpose to be fulfilled. I expect his rationale to be justified. If we do not find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq (not predicting we will, not predicting we won’t), I expect Bush to get up and say “We were wrong; there wasn’t so much of a threat after all.”

Why is it so important? Well, it speaks to trust, you know? I really want to know if our President’s claims about threats can be relied upon or not. Is that so much to ask?

The first round of talks on the new Iraqi government ended today. The largest Shi’ite group decided to stay away; not an entirely good sign, but not a disaster quite yet.

In Nasiriya, there were protests over American presence in Iraq: “No to America, No to Saddam.” Under the logic that I should recant my opposition to the war because the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam, I’m assuming that anyone who believes we should maintain a presence in Iraq should change their minds because there’s a significant number of Iraqis who’d be happy for us to leave.

No? You mean there’s more to the morality of politics than just seeing who cheers for what? Damn, didn’t realize it was that complex.

Paul Reynolds has a nice BBC piece about chemical weapons and so on. His only conclusion is that it’s important for both the US and the UK to find the weapons we claimed Iraq had, and I think this is precisely accurate. More on this in a moment.

Best line about the French evah:

“It’s not true that the French are ungrateful for what the Americans did in WW2. In fact they’re so inspired by the American example that they plan to wait two years until they personally are attacked, then join the coalition and pretend the war against Saddam was all their idea.”

Huh. This is really interesting; someone took a listen to the ABC live broadcast of Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and the CNN report on Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and you know what? CNN really has the boos miked way higher. There’s one guy yelling “Booo” really loudly in the CNN version who doesn’t show up at all in the ABC version.

Listen for yourself. I didn’t think I’d hear a difference, but I did. I’m not gonna claim it’s foul play — it could just be a different set of mikes used by CNN — but it is really distinct.

This also tends to explain why a fair number of bloggers perceived nothing but boos, which honestly confused me at the time. I watched the Oscars live, and I was pretty sure I heard mixed boos and cheers. Anyone just watching the CNN footage would certainly have gotten the impression that the boos outweighed the cheers by a country mile.

I got my first piece of spam offering copies of the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards today. Some yobbo’s selling the PDF on Ebay. You can download it for free from the DoD, of course. Here’s someone who printed out the PDF onto card stock, and is selling the results for 16 bucks a pop; he’s also claiming that you can’t print from the PDFs others are selling.

Just amazing.

Frontline ran an excellent piece on North Korea tonight. As usual, they stuck all the good stuff up on their Web site. Gotta love it.

And, since (as we all know) PBS is hopelessly liberal and biased, they made sure to include an interview with the highest ranking North Korean ever to defect in which he praises Bush to the skies. Cunning, those liberals.

My cynicism aside, I particularly liked the Ashton Carter interview. He has lots of good insights, and he takes a pretty rational appearing line on the implications of a war on the Korean peninsula. Also, he has the quote of the entire piece:

I remember in 1994, when we were dealing with North Korea, the intelligence experts would come in, and they would say, “That’s a very interesting statement by the North Koreans. It’s rather conciliatory.” I’d say, “How can you tell that’s conciliatory?” And they would say, in effect, “Well, you know, it doesn’t say anything about your mother.”