If not WMD, then what?

Now that the administration has had to admit that we may not be able to find the WMD they were so sure Saddam had, they're floating yet another justifcation for the war: Showing the world how tough america is, and that democracy is the best hope for the future.

So, if WMD weren't the primary reason for the war, why did we make such a fuss about them? Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."I don't know about anyone else, but when someone feels they need to tell me that they're not lying, it usually makes me less likely to believe that they aren't, but that's just me.

This latest attempt at justifying the war is premised on the idea that 9/11 "changed everything" and that the United States needed to make an object lesson of someone in order to show nations, particularly in the Middle East, that it's not a good idea to mess with us. We also wanted to send the message that democracy is good.

Senior officials decided that unless action was taken, the Middle East would continue to be a breeding ground for terrorists. Officials feared that young Arabs, angry about their lives and without hope, would always looking for someone to hate — and that someone would always be Israel and the United States.

Europeans thought the solution was to get a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But American officials felt a Middle East peace agreement would only be part of the solution.

The Bush administration felt that a new start was needed in the Middle East and that Iraq was the place to show that it is democracy — not terrorism — that offers hope.

Of course, that message about democracy is getting a bit muddled at the moment. As was recently reported, the US has been caught off guard by how much the Shi'ite majority in Iraq wants it's own government - and how strong of a force they are to be reckoned with. The problem, of course, is that if the Shi'ites are able to establish the kind of government they want, it will be a fundamentalist theocracy - pretty much the last thing we want to see there. So now we end up in the position of telling Iraq "Sure, you can have democracy - just don't pick a form of government we don't like". It kind of defeats the purpose of it, doesn't it?

One of the biggest complaints anti-war advocates had before the war was that the justification kept shifting - Saddam had WMD, Saddam had ties to al-Qaeda, Saddam might give WMD to al-Qaeda, Saddam treated his people badly, and so on - whatever they administration thought would win it the most support on any given day. Now, even though the war is over, they're still changing their justifications.

Posted by thorswitch at April 25, 2003 03:46 PM | TrackBack