WHEN EVIL DOES NOT SUFFICE

The War Over the War (Thomas L. Friedman, 8/03/03, NY Times)

History may one day record that maybe the most honest speech about why we invaded Iraq was given by Prime Minister Tony Blair, addressing the filing cabinets in an empty hallway just outside his office at No. 10 Downing Street.

The moment is recounted in Peter Stothard's terrific book "30 Days." Mr. Stothard, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, was allowed to follow Mr. Blair around in the 30 days immediately before and after the start of the Iraq war. His book is a daily diary. On March 13, six days before the British Parliament would be asked to vote for war, Mr. Blair was stewing in his office, worrying about whether he would win the vote.

Mr. Blair knew the real and good reasons for ousting Saddam Hussein: First, he was a genocidal dictator, who aspired to acquire weapons of mass destruction ? even if he did not have them yet. And second, removing Saddam and building a more decent Iraq would help tilt the Middle East onto a more progressive political track and send a message to all the neighboring regimes that Western governments were not going to just sit back and let them incubate suicide bombers and religious totalitarians, whose fanaticism threatened all open societies. These were the good reasons for the war, and Mr. Blair voiced some of them aloud that day.

As Mr. Stothard recalled the scene outside Mr. Blair's office: "the prime minister takes a walk out into the hall and stands, shaking out his limbs, between [his political adviser] Sally Morgan's door and a dark oil painting of Pitt the Younger. . . . Morgan is away from her desk. [Mr. Blair] looks into the empty interior as if the answer to the latest state of the vote count will emerge from her filing cabinets nonetheless. He comes back out, disappointed, and looks around him. `What amazes me,' [Mr. Blair says,] `is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of [the Zimbabwean leader Robert] Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should.' "

Alas, Mr. Blair never really made this case to his public. Why not? Because the British public never would have gone to war for the good reasons alone. Why not? Because the British public had not gone through 9/11 and did not really feel threatened, because it demanded a U.N. legal cover for any war and because it didn't like or trust George Bush.

Sadly, but deservedly, Mr. Blair lives in a world that, while he may not have made, he helps to maintain. He couldn't give that honest speech because the search for UN cover forced him and us into selling a cause for the war that, while entirely legitimate, was utterly secondary: WMD. Paul Wolfowitz has already described the emphasis on WMD as merely a bureaucratic compromise. But if we're going to continue with the deadly farce of multilateralism and internationalism that Mr. Blair still clings to for some reason, then we're going to have to engage in these kind of kabuki dances. One can't have both honesty and the support of the U.N..

There was, by the way, a far more honest speech given about the war:

''F--- Saddam. We're taking him out.'' Those were the words of the president, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies.

Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 3, 2003 1:20 AM