[Mb-civic] More Than a 'Mistake' on Iraq - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

More Than a 'Mistake' on Iraq

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 29, 2005; A21

A line is forming outside the Iraq confessional. It consists of 
Democratic presidential aspirants -- where's Hillary? -- who voted for 
the war in Iraq and now concede that they made a "mistake." Former 
senator John Edwards did that Nov. 13 in a Post op-ed article, and Sen. 
Joseph Biden uttered the "M" word Sunday on "Meet the Press." "It was a 
mistake," said Biden. "It was a mistake," wrote Edwards. Yes and yes, 
says Cohen. But it is also a mistake to call it a mistake.

Both senators have a point, of course. They were told by the president 
and members of his War Cabinet -- Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld -- that Iraq 
possessed weapons of mass destruction. In particular, those three 
emphasized Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program. As late as August 
2003, Condoleezza Rice was saying that she was "certain to this day that 
this regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it 
had biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." To be 
charitable, she didn't know what she was talking about.

As it turned out, neither did Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld. Cheney said, "Increasingly, we believe that the United 
States will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon, and Rumsfeld 
raised a truly horrible specter: "Imagine a Sept. 11th with weapons of 
mass destruction" that would kill "tens of thousands of innocent men, 
women and children." Imagine a defense secretary who thought he was 
propaganda minister.

I quote this trio of braying exaggerators -- all of them still in the 
administration -- because they emphasized the purported nuclear weapons 
threat. Yet by the time the war began, March 20, 2003, it was quite 
clear that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. All the evidence for one 
-- the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa -- had been challenged. 
What's more, U.N. inspectors in Iraq had found nothing. "We have to date 
found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related 
activities in Iraq," said Mohamed ElBaradei of the U.N.'s International 
Atomic Energy Agency. That was on Feb. 14. The next month, the United 
States went to war anyway.

In their respective confessions, neither Edwards nor Biden explains why 
they were not persuaded by the evidence that Bush & Co. were 
exaggerating -- concocting is possibly a better word -- Saddam Hussein's 
nuclear threat. Of course, that still leaves chemical and biological 
weapons. But chemical arms have been around since 1915 and World War I. 
Biological weapons are a different story, but they are hard to deliver 
and not all that effective. Whatever the case, before Sept. 11, 
Americans hardly feared Hussein's chemical or biological weapons.

Sept. 11 changed all that. The terrorist attacks, coupled with the 
still-unexplained deaths of five people from anthrax sent through the 
mail, unhinged America. Cooler heads in the Bush administration seized 
the moment to plump for a war they had always wanted while many of the 
rest of us -- myself included -- got caught up in an emotional frenzy. 
Even after the passions of the moment cooled -- even after it was clear 
Iraq was no real imminent threat -- few of us demanded that Bush back 
down. The best I could do was whisper some doubt. On July 25, 2002, I 
wrote that the Bush administration would pay dearly if it was going to 
wage war for specious reasons. "War plans are being drawn up in the 
Pentagon," I wrote. "But explanations are lacking at the White House."

Well, those explanations are still lacking. But so, too, are those from 
Democrats who say they made a "mistake" in supporting the war. What sort 
of mistake? It's not a mistake to be misled. But it is a mistake, if 
that's even the right word, to lack the courage of your convictions, to 
get swept up in the zeitgeist and dig in your heels even harder -- not 
as a consequence of hardening conviction but of accumulating doubt. This 
is a mistake of great consequence, a failure of judgment or political 
courage, and it needs to be explained.

I do not hold the new war critics to a higher standard than those who 
led us to war or who still think it was a dandy idea. But we will learn 
nothing from this debacle if the word "mistake" can be used like a 
blackboard eraser just to wipe the slate clean. This is no different 
from what Bush is trying to do: The intelligence was bad, not his 
wretched judgment. To accept this explanation does not -- both for the 
president and his critics -- undo the mistake. On the contrary, it 
compounds it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/28/AR2005112801225.html?nav=hcmodule
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