Watching Tim Russert grill President Bush on the subject of Saddam's WMDs, I couldn't help but consider the irony: that the man who led the fight against one of the world's worst dictators is himself being treated like a criminal. Why? Because he dared to win that war and will probably win the upcoming election.
Russert tried over and over again to trick the President into saying that he, Bush, had decided to remove Saddam from power all by himself, with little or no evidence of wrongdoing, and against the advice of the CIA and Congress. Does that approach even make any sense, when Congress overwhelmingly approved the Authorisation for Use of Military Force in Iraq in October 2002? President Bush even apologised for giving the exact same answer no matter how many different ways Russert phrased it, but there really is only one answer to the question, "why did you say that Saddam had WMDS?"
And that answer is, "because almost every piece of evidence said that he did." Saddam's people said he did (once they escaped the country). Saddam's relatives said he did (once they escaped the country). The experts working under the United Nations said that he did. Saddam said he didn't, but the UN inspectors kept on finding banned weapons anyway. You can only hear someone say, "oh, yes, I forgot about THAT" so many times before you stop believing him or her. Somehow, Bush's detractors seem to suggest that he should have gone to Iraq himself and led UNMOVIC inspection teams instead of relying on their documentation and reports from nearly every intelligence service in the world. Or, perhaps, simply waited until Saddam's weapons capabilities were proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by a cloud of death floating over Jerusalem. Or New York City. Does anyone doubt that they would then scream that he'd failed to protect us?
If you smell smoke, hear a fire alarm, and hear people in the hallway yelling, "Fire!", how long do you wait to gather more evidence before you conclude that yes, the building is in flames? Do you wait until you wake up in the burn unit of the local hospital (if at all), or do you get your friends and family out of the building? If one person out of hundreds says, "I'm not yet fully convinced there's a fire," do you keep waiting, risking the lives of so many others, ignoring the mountain of evidence that the fire is real? That's precisely what the Left seems to claim President Bush ought to have done. They applied no similarly high standard to Mr. Clinton, of course, when he bombed Baghdad and an aspirin factory in Khartoum, and invaded Bosnia. No one claimed to have been misled.
Many have spoken even more definitely about the existence of Saddam's WMDs based upon the exact same evidence as President Bush saw. In 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said, "Saddam's goal... is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed." National Security Advisor Sandy Berger said, "(Saddam) will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and some day, some way, I am certain he will use that arsenal again, as he has 10 times since 1983." Joe Lieberman, Dianne Feinstein, Tom Daschle, John Kerry and others wrote a letter in 1998 urging the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs". President Clinton did so (Operation Desert Fox), and told Larry King in 2003:
...Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know.
In October 2002, John Kerry said, "I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force - if necessary - to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." Kerry also stated, "The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation." Kerry also said, "(W)e need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. ...And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. That is why the world, through the United Nations Security Council, has spoken with one voice, demanding that Iraq disclose its weapons programs and disarm."
John "Flip" Kerry, the odds-on favorite for the Democratic Presidential nomination, is singing a different tune these days. Former head of the Iraq Survey Group David Kay has reported not yet finding large stockpiles of those weapons Kerry himself railed about just months before the liberation of Iraq began. (Kay reported that everyone he spoke to sincerely believed that Saddam had such weapons, by the way.) Kerry's now backpedaling faster than a bicyclist approaching a cliff, saying, "We were misled not only in the intelligence but misled in the way that the President took us to war." Obviously, he doesn't include President Bush in that "we", though they had the same information upon which to base decisions.
But how do Kerry and the rest of the Democrats ascribe their own hawkish position on Saddam's WMDs six years ago to the "evil machinations" of President Bush only one year ago? Was the same intelligence not just as wrong then, if it was wrong at all? And how do they explain their vicious attacks on President Bush's veracity when no such outrage was aimed at Bill Clinton for citing the same intelligence analysis? As President Bush told Tim Russert in his interview, "It's politics."
