Bush Lied? Part II
Well, somehow I missed Michael Kinsley’s piece in Slate on the subject of WMD’s
According to a Harris poll out Wednesday, a majority of Americans still think the Bush administration was telling the truth before the war when it said it had hard evidence of WMD. A Knight Ridder poll released last weekend reports that a third of the populace believes that the weapons have been discovered. A Fox News poll last week found that almost half of Americans feel that the administration was “intentionally misleading” about Iraq’s weapons, but more than two-thirds think the war was justified anyway. A Gallup Poll released Wednesday concludes that almost 9 out of 10 Americans still think Saddam had or was close to having WMD.By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn’t play much of a part. The phrase itself—”weapons of mass destruction”—is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular. The term is a new one to almost everybody, and the concern it officially embodies was on almost no one’s radar screen until recently. Unofficially, “weapons of mass destruction” are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, “We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO.” If we all believe hard enough, they will be there. And it’s working.
The most striking thing about polls like these isn’t how many people believe or disbelieve some unproven factual assertion or prediction, but how few give the only correct answer, which is “don’t know.” In the Fox News poll, vast majorities expressed certitude one way or the other about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East, and so on. Those who voted “not sure” (an even more tempting cop-out than the pollsters’ usual “don’t know”) rarely broke 20 percent and usually hovered around 10. Four-fifths or more were sure about everything
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Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Sure there are—in every sense that matters, reality not being one of them.
Kinsley also answers the question many have posed about how he forms his opinions. He flips a coin!
That aside, he’s also correct. The debate about WMD’s existence is really academic at this point, most people have moved on. Yet, I’ve never been one to shy away from academic discourse.
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June 20th, 2003 at 6:29 pm
The great thing that continues to bother me incessantly about this subject is the number of people who talk as if the case for war with Iraq was built around WMDs.
It was not.
Any look at the rhetoric that was slung around throughout most of 2002 shows that it was given as one reason among many. Including the fact that he was simply acting like he had them. And a bunch of other reasons: human rights, defiance of surrender agreements, attempts to kill a former President, support for terrorists, and so on.
What bothers me most is that we sit and act as if this WMD issue was “sold to the American reason as the primary reason for war,” when that is clearly false. It was certainly the primary case we made to the U.N. after the American people gave the President the go-ahead to invade.
June 20th, 2003 at 6:53 pm
Dean, you’re exactly right. However, in Great Britain, Tony Blair stood almost solely on WMD’s and he is the one who is going to pay the price for it. President Bush can legitimately say that he had other reasons, and the American people have bought it hook, line and sinker, but the Europeans are in a whole different position.
June 20th, 2003 at 11:38 pm
It’s all about the rhetoric, isn’t it? When Bush first wanted to invade, it was all about an imminent terrorist threat, that Saddam and Iraq were an immediate danger to American freedom. But nobody really bought into that, so all of a sudden, the administration completely shifted gears, and named the mission “operation Iraqi freedom,” and said that the goal was to “liberate” the people of Iraq. Once that happened, suddenly Bush was a Saint.
You know, a burglar once “liberated” my wallet. I didn’t realize he was actually doing society a favor!
June 22nd, 2003 at 12:16 pm
I am afraid that the war with Iraq WAS built around the “imminent danger” that Saddam and his WMDs were posing to the US. We had given the President (through Congress) the power to fight terrorism and Bush HAD to make a case that that was what he was doing or have to go back to Congress and make acase for going to war.
I find Blix’s remarks interesting. He stated that he finds it interesting that the US did not want to give weapons inspectors time to find the WMDs and now ask for time themselves to find them.