A READER EMAILS:
Remember when the opponents of the war in Iraq publicly wrung their hands about American commitment to stay in Iraq? Supposedly, the hawks were only after war and conflict and were not prepared to stay for the long haul.
Colbert I King of the Washington Post posed a typical query in February:
“Are the American people committed to governing Iraq, to having a U.S. administrator run an American-created civilian government in a Muslim and Arab country, with all that entails?”
Today, he himself answers the question in an editorial entitled, “Is There a Road Map Out of Iraq?” Shocking, but it turns out that the people whose commitment the pre-war anti-war types were concerned about were themselves!
Go figure. Meanwhile Brendan O’Neill is unimpressed with people who claim they were duped by talk of weapons of mass destruction:
Take Jane Harman, a Democrat Congresswomen from Los Angeles who sits on the USA’s House Intelligence Committee. Harman has kicked up a stink in the USA by alleging that the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s WMD were ‘based on circumstantial evidence rather than hard facts’, and that she and other right-thinking Democrats might have acted differently over Iraq if they had known the whole truth (4).
What a crock. This is a woman who over the past year has sat on the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security and now the House Intelligence Committee on Iraq. She had access to the bulk of the evidence on Iraq, in all its questionable glory. And she, like a majority of her fellow Democrats, voted for Bush’s war resolution in October 2002. If Harman was duped, it can only be because she wanted to be.
Being a believer in addressing root causes — by which I mean turning the Middle East upside down and shaking, hard — the WMD issue has never been my prime reason for war, but this is an interesting piece. Question: By saying that WMDs were the only legitimate reason for going to war against Iraq, aren’t a lot of people setting themselves up for (1) supporting war against North Korea or Iran; and (2) putting themselves in the position of opposing intervention in Liberia?
ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: Oops. Brendan O’Neill’s statement about a majority of Democrats is wrong, says Tony Adragna. It was a lot, but not a majority.