It was a real glass-half-empty/glass-half-full moment. The world
suddenly looked like one of those trompe-l’oeil drawings
that, while remaining unchanged, appears by turns to be an ornate
vase and a pair of faces staring at each other. In the New York
Times, Jessica Stern, a lecturer at the Kennedy School at
Harvard and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious
Militants Kill, wrote
that “the bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad was
the latest evidence that America has taken a country that was not a
terrorist threat and turned it into one.”
A pretty damning indictment, you might suppose. But the Wall
Street Journal carried an editorial
the very same day claiming that the attack was “merely
validating what some of us have said all along about the war in
Iraq” — namely that “the link between Saddam and al Qaeda might
not have been provable beyond a reasonable doubt, but they shared
the common purpose of ousting the U.S. from the Middle East. Now
the foreign jihadis flooding the country are proving the
point by joining up with Baath Party remnants that want to restore
Saddam’s terrorist rule.”
Hold on a minute there! How could the same event — not similar
events but the same event — prove Bush both wrong and right about
Iraq and terrorism? If terrorists were appearing after Saddam
Hussein was gone, did that mean they were not there before? Or did
it mean that those who identified Iraq as a center of terrorism
while the dictator was still in place were really doing so
proleptically? To me it seems obvious that neither of these things
can be true. But it is absurd to suggest, as Miss Stern does, that
America has somehow created the terrorist threat, or that the war
in Iraq has led to a boom in “terrorist recruitment around the
globe.”
Does she really suppose that, were it not for the invasion of
Iraq, al-Qaeda would have had to pack up and go home for lack of
any way to recruit volunteers? Of course they used the invasion of
Iraq to recruit, but they will use anything that’s to hand for that
purpose. And for so long as we do anything about
terrorism, there will be something to hand for them. We know that
there are a number of itinerant Islamic terrorists in the world.
Many of them were in Afghanistan until they were driven out. Now
they must be somewhere else. If you were one of them you might well
want to go to Iraq just now for the chance to encounter the enemy
directly, but your being there would tell us nothing one way or the
other about the Bush administration’s justifications for war. It
certainly would not justify any claim that it had turned the
country into a terrorist threat.
But the rival interpretations of the same event provided a good
illustration of a truth that we all think we know about politics
but that we all have to re-learn with monotonous regularity:
everything depends on how you look at it. If you see the world as
Jessica Stern does, it seems an easy step to go on to say, as
Maureen
Dowd did on the same page of the same day’s Times,
that the terror attacks were particularly piquant because the Bush
administration before the war had “ginned up links between Saddam
and Al Qaeda” and so “made it sound as if Islamic fighters on a
jihad against America were slouching toward Baghdad to
join forces with murderous Iraqis.”
Miss Dowd has more than the usual share of the journalist’s lust
for irony, so she couldn’t resist “sexing up” the sequence of
events in order to prove her own point that “the Bush team has now
created the very monster that it conjured up to alarm Americans
into backing a war on Iraq.” But she offered no evidence that the
Bush team had done any such conjuring, or claimed that there were
al-Qaeda men blowing things up in Iraq. Similarly without examples,
she went on to write that “the democracy dominoes are not falling
as easily as Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons had predicted.”
Really? When did the notoriously cautious Mr. Wolfowitz and those
darned neocons predict that the dominoes would fall easily? Maureen
isn’t telling.
By the way, the appearance of her column on the same page and
the same day as another by a guest columnist saying the same thing
might once have been considered an editorial slip-up. Even today,
another paper might have told Miss Stern to take her piece
elsewhere, since their in-house columnist was already doing it. Or
else they might have asked Miss Dowd to pick another subject. But
the New York Times op-ed page nowadays seems to take the
view that it can never have too much Bush-bashing, and the
punchier, cuter Maureen Dowd has apparently taken it upon herself
to reinforce as many as possible of the stock of journalistic
accusations of wrongdoing against Bush in her own inimitable
style.
But that’s really the point, isn’t it? Once you’ve decided on
accusation and wrongdoing everything — or almost everything — can
be made to fit the pattern. Even the things that the other side
thinks exonerates their man from charges of wrongdoing! Doubtless
the Journal’s editorialists were equally quick to leap to
conclusions partly because of the seriousness of the charges being
brought by the other side. But why were we talking about wrongdoing
in the first place? All political decisions are made on the basis
of partial information and all have unforeseen consequences. It
follows that if you take such things as evidence of wrongdoing your
entire approach to politics will be founded on the assumption of
continuous and never-ending scandal.
That seems to be the point at which we have arrived over the
question of Weapons of Mass Destruction. It simply was not possible
to know what the truth was, but there were lots of intelligence
data suggesting both that Saddam had ‘em and that they were a real
and imminent danger. Paul Wolfowitz has already admitted — if you
consider it an admission — that the administration had lots of
other reasons for wanting to go to war with Hussein, but it thought
that this threat, based on the kind of “murky” intelligence data
that nearly all intelligence data is, was the part of their reason
most likely immediately and forcefully to appeal to the public.
Did that make them liars? Crooks? Incompetents? Only if you
assume (a) that the other part of their reason for making war was
discreditable — for example that they wanted to get their hands on
Iraqi oil or to get some fat contracts for Halliburton — and (b)
that they knew that the intelligence data was not just “murky” but
false. Both of these conditions beggar belief if you have the
slightest degree of trust in your government or your fellow man. It
is therefore apparent that that trust is what the journalistic and
academic Bush-bashers are asking us to abandon with the abandon of
their own accusations against the President. Just so you know.
