Why Are We at War? Read Free Page B

presentation before the U.N. on February 5, 2003. Up to a point, it was well detailed and ready to prove (to no one’s dramatic surprise) that Saddam Hussein was violating every rule of the inspectors that he could get away with. Saddam, after all, had a keen nose for the vagaries of history. He understood that the longer one could delay powerful statesmen, the more they might weary of the soul-deadening boredom of dealing with a consummate liar who was artfully free of all the bonds of obligation and cooperation. It is no small gift to be an absolute liar. If you never tell the truth, you are virtually as safe as an honest man who never utters an untruth. When informed that youjust swore to the opposite today of what you avowed yesterday, you remark, “I never said that,” or should the words be on record, you declare that you are grossly misinterpreted. Rich confusion is sown, teeming with permutations.
    So, Saddam had managed to survive seven years of inspection from 1991 to 1998. He had made deals—most of them under the counter—with the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Jordanians; the list is long. He also knew how to play on the sympathies of the third world. He convinced many a good heart. The continuing cruelty of America was starving the Iraqi children. The Iraqi children were, in large part, seriously malnourished by the embargo Saddam had brought upon himself, but indeed, if they had been healthy, he would have kept a score of six-year-olds starving long enough to dispatch a proper photograph around the globe. He was no good and he could prove it. He did so well at the games he played that he succeeded in declaring the inspections at an end by 1998.
    There had been talk before, and there was certainlytalk then in the White House, that we had to send troops into Iraq as our reply to such flouting of the agreement. Unfortunately, Clinton’s adventure with Monica Lewinsky had left him a paralyzed warrior. In the midst of his public scandal, he could not afford to shed one drop of American blood. The proof was in Kosovo, where no American infantry went in with NATO and our bombers never dropped their product from any height within range of Serbian anti-aircraft. We did it all from fifteen thousand feet up. So Iraq was out of the question. Al Gore was a hawk at the time, ready, doubtless, to improve his future campaign image and rise thereby from wonk to stud—a necessary qualification for the presidency—but Clinton’s vulnerability stifled all that.
    So in 1998, Saddam Hussein got away with it. There had been no inspections since. Colin Powell’s speech was full of righteous indignation at the barefaced and heinous bravado of Saddam the Evil, but Powell was, of course, too intelligent a man to be surprised by these discoveries of malfeasance. The speech was an attempt to heat up America’s readinessto go to war. By the measure of our polls, half of the citizenry were unready. And this part of his speech certainly succeeded. The proof was that a good many Democratic senators who had been on the fence declared that they were in on the venture now; yes, they too were ready for war, God bless us.

    The major weakness in Powell’s presentation of the evidence was, however, the evidential link of Iraq to al Qaeda. It was, given the powerful auspices of the occasion, more than a bit on the sparse side. With the exception of Britain, the states with veto power in the Security Council, the French, the Chinese, and the Russians, were obviously not eager to satisfy the Bush passion to go to war as soon as possible. They wanted time to intensify inspections. They looked to containment as a solution.
    Not a week later, al Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden which gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the“socialists” in Baghdad “infidels.” But this last statement was in immediate contradiction to what he had just