"Where Are They?"

Justin Katz has a fine column this week on the political wrangling surrounding the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

.... The “rhetorical questioning” has devolved into little more than a legitimacy drop cloth thrown over underlying ulterior motives. One can make deductively reasonable guesses as to what those motives might be — political ambition, moral insecurity, ideological intransigence — but the questions themselves persist.

That they require repeated and prominent asking to maintain relevance is obvious from the minimal amount of new information required to spark repetition. Indeed, to keep the topic in the public conversation, various media outlets, from the Guardian to the New York Times to the Associated Press, have misrepresented statements of Bush administration officials, cited anonymous “analysts,” and selectively quoted from the broad pool of intelligence documents available before the war.

The reason that such tactics are necessary is that there is no real basis for the theme to be pounded for so long a duration. To be sure, the search for the WMDs ought not be allowed to peter off — if only because any weapons that still exist may have been, or soon could be, dispersed to dangerous parties. However, while the United States is shoulder deep in the mire of helping a nation to learn to be free, as a preface to reconstruction after a decades-long decomposition, it is premature and counterproductive to begin sowing seeds of doubt.

This is particularly true considering that WMDs were not the sole justification for war, and the argument about them focused on Saddam Hussein’s unwillingness to prove his relinquished ambitions. The broader context of the war included, of course, the War on Terrorism and the faltering credibility of the United Nations, as well as Iraq’s significance to the global economy and its strategic position, both geographically and for diplomatic purposes, to increase leverage and decrease the likelihood of more-dangerous wars. However, three distinct arguments were made for war based specifically on the country and its leading regime, with different people emphasizing different aspects to varying degrees....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 06/12/03 10:55:55 AM
Categorized as Political.