If only they had known, Congressional Democrats now say, they
would not have supported the invasion of Iraq the way they did, and
they would have asked some really tough questions. But how were
they to know? Apparently the White House led them down a garden
path, and deceived them. As Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Saturday in his party’s
weekly radio address, President Bush’s claim that Iraq was seeking
uranium in Africa was “highly misleading,” but “not an inadvertent
mistake.” In other words, Levin implied, Bush was lying.
And, as Levin went on: “Even more troubling is evidence that the
uranium statement was just one of many questionable statements and
exaggerations by the intelligence community and administration
officials in the buildup to the war.”
Levin, of course, was seeking to absolve himself and his
Democratic colleagues from blame for the deteriorating situation in
Iraq. Indeed it goes from bad to worse. We are facing a “classical
guerrilla-type campaign” in Iraq, according to the new U.S.
commander there, and American soldiers are dying. At the same the
cost of stabilizing Iraq now hovers at $4 billion a month, and the
promise of establishing a democracy there is fading.
Congressional Democrats, however, know a partisan issue when
they see one: They had backed the war, or at least declined to
criticize it, only because the White House had misled them; if they
had known the truth, or had access to the intelligence reports,
they would have acted differently.
But this is not even remotely true. You did not need the
intelligence reports to know the administration was on its way to a
historic blunder, and doubts were expressed, even
in this column. The Democrats, however, read the polls, and
realized the war was popular. Expressing any reservations about
administration policy would not have been politically expedient,
and for the Democrats to claim otherwise is hypocrisy of a high
order. Their refusal to criticize Iraq policy was never principled;
it was always political.
Certainly the Democrats now have potent issues they can use in
the next election. The administration insisted that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, but so far none has been found. It
also insisted Iraqi was working hand in glove with al Qaeda, but
there is no evidence to prove that, either. The stated rationale
for invading Iraq has collapsed, and the insular ideologues who
formulated Iraq policy and the equally insular conservative
journalists who supported them — they learn about the world mostly
by talking to one another — have turned out to be a blessing for
liberals. The ideologues and journalists, though, are in denial
about this, just as they are in the denial about the mess they have
made of foreign policy.
On the other hand, the ideologues and journalists no longer talk
much about how the Iraqis are yearning to be free and want to be
neo-Americans — but beware, they now talk like that about the
Iranians, and no good can come of that — or how the Iraqi National
Congress can take over the government. Instead they now are saying
the U.S. is in Iraq for the long haul, and that it must not cut and
run (or at least not until after the 2004 election).
Meanwhile some prominent figures in the administration now seem
to be modifying, or even reversing, their old positions. The
insistence that we had reliable, up-to-date intelligence on Iraq,
for example, has been discarded. As Donald Rumsfeld told Congress
last week, “The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had
discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of
mass destruction. We acted because we saw the evidence in a new
light, through the prism of our experience on September 11.”
Translated, I think, that means that Rumsfeld and his
like-minded colleagues wanted to believe there was cause to invade
Iraq, and so they believed it. They were full of themselves and
their mission. The U.S. would act alone if it had to, and if the
United Nations did not approve of this, it was the U.N.’s loss, and
not ours. On the eve of the Iraqi invasion, President Bush warned
the U.N. that unless it went along with U.S. proposals it risked
fading “into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating
society.”
But that was then, and the insular ideologues have now
discovered that we may need the rest of the world, after all.
Rumsfeld talks about the international coalition we have assembled
in Iraq, but it is still an overwhelmingly American operation, with
a little help from the Brits — and we need much more foreign
assistance. The White House is getting ready to approach the U.N.,
hat in hand, and asking it to intervene in Iraq.
