THAT'S NOT ALL YOU MISSED:

On War in Iraq: Hard to say what's more suspect: the case for intervention or the timing of the debate (Harold Meyerson, September 13, 2002, LA Weekly)

MAYBE IT'S JUST ME, BUT I SEEM TO HAVE MISSED THE CASE FOR GOING to war with Iraq.

I am writing on the eve of President Bush's address to the U.N., where he will presumably make the case for intervention. I know he will because he has to make the case. Everyone has told him he has to make the case. And there is something peculiarly backward about this process.

Normally, the case for going to war -- this kind of war -- begins with the discovery of evidence. That was the genesis of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance: Our U-2 spy planes discovered and photographed Soviet missiles being installed in Cuba; John Kennedy took to the airwaves to share this information; and Adlai Stevenson, our U.N. ambassador, produced the photos during the Security Council's debate on the crisis. That is, the evidence preceded the discussion.

Not here. Bush may well produce some photographic evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program, but not because it is something our spy satellites stumbled upon last Tuesday. In this instance, he is producing evidence because it is already his announced national policy to go to war with Iraq, and he has been compelled by a cabal of vulgar empiricists to come up with a reason. In short, Bush is not producing supply-side evidence. He is producing demand-side evidence. Which, as evidence goes, is inherently the shakiest kind.

And it's not as if the administration hasn't been trying to find a smoking gun. Our intelligence agencies have spent a year, quite properly, trying to discover any link between Iraq and the al Qaeda attacks of last September. They have looked for any evidence that Iraq's nuclear program is any closer than half-a-decade away from producing a bomb. Not only have they not found any convincing evidence of a 9/11 connection or an A-bomb in the making, they have yet to find any indication of an Iraqi delivery system that could send a nuke, or chemical or biological weapons, our way. The intelligence agencies' failure to come up with anything decisive, however, has never been a factor in the administration's determination to go to war.[...]

Ranking all the dangerous ideas and idiotic policies, foreign and domestic, that the Bush administration has churned out in its 20 months in office is an arduous task, but pre-emptive war is plainly the biggest doozy of them all. The United Nations Charter -- drafted, chiefly by the United States, in 1945 -- prohibits such wars, and understandably so. Both world wars began with pre-emptive German attacks on neighboring states, and the vision of a world in which states could attack rival states for fear of what their rivals might someday do was abhorrent to the charter's authors. And for all its military ventures, justified and not, since 1945, the United States had never repudiated the charter's proscription of pre-emption. Until this summer, when Bush, speaking at West Point, did just that.

To appreciate just how deftly the administration dispatched its critics this week, it's helpful to check out another tardy column, this one by an editor at The American Prospect. Mr. Meyerson completely misjudged the case that the President planned to make at the U.N., supposing it to involve a Power Point presentation or something similar, on Saddam's weapons program. Instead, of course, the President merely poointed out that Saddam is in violation of 16 UN resolutions and therefore has violated the truce that saved his skin in 1991.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2002 1:45 PM