A gag Christmas gift came to my house, a “countdown clock” key chain labeled “Backwards Bush.” As I write there are 1,114 days, 8 hours, 27 minutes, and–let’s see–20.9 seconds left in his second term. That’s an eternity if you don’t like Bush.
I’m guessing most Bush bashers who read the Tribune editorials, which concluded on December 28, judged them a shameless apologia for the president. Given the language that launched them, I found them surprisingly balanced.
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Try to remember the state of the nation three years ago. Most Americans supported the looming invasion of Iraq because Bush said it was the right thing to do; others thought the idea was reprehensible, many simply because the idea was Bush’s. But some Americans with no love for the president believed the war might accomplish something useful. The troubling questions in their minds–our minds, because I was one–were these: Could a war be justified that seemed not absolutely necessary and that Bush (less so Tony Blair) flogged by playing to our fears? Was this the right war at the wrong time–when bin Laden should be the quarry, not Hussein? And if going to war was the thing to do, could we trust this war to Bush, who touted it as if unaware that war is chaotic and evil?
I’ll quote mainly from the December 28 editorial, which summarized the series. Much of what the White House said before the war about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be “flat-out wrong,” the Tribune said. “In putting so much emphasis on illicit weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed.” As for Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda, “No compelling evidence ties Iraq to Sept. 11, 2001, as the White House implied. . . . By stripping its rhetoric of the ambiguity present in the intel data, the White House exaggerated this argument for war.” And as for Iraq as a sponsor of terrorism generally, “The argument that Hussein was able to foment global terror against this country and its interests was exaggerated.” What American intelligence surmised and the Bush administration believed, the Tribune said in its December 7 editorial on Iraq and terrorism, surpassed the “less bombastic facts on the ground.” But given the prospect of Hussein selling WMDs to terrorists, the Tribune forgave Bush for erring on the side of belligerence.
Bush bashers should concede this. Perhaps it occurred to some of them during the Tribune’s six-week-long project that the paper was testing the purity of water long since over the dam. When I’d finished it I thought, “Good. Now let’s move on. Let’s debate the war the way it needs to be debated–on how it’s been run.” From inadequate troop levels to the lack of armor on troop carriers to the brutalizing of prisoners and sacking of independent-minded generals to the shrug that “stuff happens” when liberation gave way to anarchy, the White House has plenty to answer for. The public wants to end this war, but it doesn’t want to lose it. It doesn’t think we can afford to.
