Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Risen is full of shit

Last night I watched Charlie Rose's interview of James Risen, author of a new "expose" of Bush's march to war in Iraq. (A commentary on some of Risen's assertions in the book may be found here, and of course Risen's been all over the tube lately, including The Daily Show.) What struck me was Risen's statement that "everybody" thought Saddam Hussein had WMD's before the invasion, and that, as a result, Risen opined that Bush/Cheney didn't "lie" about their existence, they just convinced themselves of that fact in spite of the absence of hard evidence, a kind of "wishful thinking."

First of all, there was plenty of evidence of the absence of WMDs, as Risen himself states in the portions of the book cited by above-linked article. In addition to the failure of the UN weapons inspectors to find any WMD despite open access to all sites in Iraq, there were repeated prewar statements by Scott Ritter and others--inside Iraq, inside the federal government and outside--that the decade-long surveillance and sanctions on Iraq made it unlikely that WMD's could have been developed. Second--and this pisses me off no end--the issue in the weeks before the invasion wasn't "does Saddam have WMD?", it was, "given that it's still not clear whether he does or not" what is the remedy, the proper course of action?

With UN inspection teams driving in their white vans all over the place (recall those images?), scurrying unannounced and unobstructed in their searches and time after time finding nothing, what should the US do? Invade and bomb, or continue with the inspections, as Blix and al Baradei and all but Britain in the Security Council urged? Saddam was surrounded by our massing forces, his every move was watched, his nation was being scoured for evidence. So--even if it was "wishful thinking" that led Bush to conclude Saddam had WMD, what should he have done as leader of the "free world": Made war--or made certain?

No comments: