On Sunday, President Bush abandoned his re-election strategy of looking presidential and staying above the fray to go one-on-one with Washington's toughest interviewer, Tim Russert, on NBC's "Meet the Press." While there has been no shortage of bad news for the president lately, the move was seen primarily as a chance to do damage control in light of testimony by David Kay, who recently resigned as our chief weapons inspector in Iraq, that it appears Saddam Hussein did not possess the weapons of mass destruction which were the basis for our invasion of Iraq. Anyone buying into the hype of George W. Bush being a man of integrity and thus expecting a degree of culpability for such a grievous error as leading the nation into war on false pretenses was instead treated to the performance one would expect of any incumbent president falling in the polls during an election year, dodging uncomfortable questions and spinning wherever possible.
The Bush administration has so far employed two methods of dealing with Kay's revelations: one of trying to deflect responsibility for starting a war based on faulty intelligence, the other of trying to resituate this question within a larger case for war with Iraq. The main strategy which the administration has employed to cover its back on the issue of weapons of mass destruction is to point out that the Bush administration was not alone in believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. On "Meet the Press," Bush pointed out that the Clinton administration, the United Nations and most of Congress believed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In many ways, this makes the Bush administration look worse, not better. Others had the same information Bush had when he made the decision to go to war, but wanted to seek something more concrete before sending men into battle. Knowing what we know now, this appears to be the wiser approach. Bush presumably brings up the others who believed Saddam possessed these weapons to insulate his administration against charges that it hyped intelligence, but he dodged the question when Russert asked why intelligence that had been presented to his administration as highly qualified had been relayed to the American people by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld as demonstrating "without a doubt" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (Secretary Rumsfeld went so far as to say we knew where they were). If they were not being intentionally deceitful, members of the Bush administration were at best reckless and irresponsible in the way they sold the war to the American people.
The most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the intelligence failure in Iraq is that the Bush doctrine of preemptive war is untenable. The United States cannot maintain a stance of waging war against perceived threats if our perception is open to such grave error. Unfortunately, the president doesn't seem aware of the problem raised by this. When Russert raised the possibility of employing the Bush doctrine against Iran or North Korea in light of the intelligence failure in Iraq, Bush repeated his assertion about how clear the intelligence was at the time he made his decision, ignoring the fact that it was wrong. It is troubling in itself that he does not seem bothered that his decision was based on false intelligence.
What is far more troubling is that the president has given every indication that, in the future, if presented with intelligence that seemed as conclusive as the intelligence on Iraq seemed, he would act in the same manner even knowing that the intelligence in Iraq was highly inaccurate. The Bush administration's reluctance to disavow its doctrine of preemptive war in light of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq backs up John Kerry's criticism that when faced with a fact and a theory that don't coincide, this administration will throw away the fact in favor of the theory.
The Bush administration has also engaged in some revisionist history, justifying the war in terms of the humanitarian benefit to the Iraqi people and threats posed to America apart from possessing weapons of mass destruction. While there are some compelling arguments to be made along these lines, they are being made a year too late. In laying out the case for war during his State of the Union in 2003, President Bush devoted a couple of sentences to the suffering of the oppressed Iraqis and about 15 paragraphs talking about the weapons we now know Saddam Hussein did not possess. If anything, David Kay's revelations and President Bush's subsequent reluctance to hold himself and his administration accountable for the mistakes they have made should force supporters of the President to drop claims that the Iraq war demonstrates what a strong and courageous leader he is. Had he gone before the American people before the war and made a case for war based primarily on the points being emphasized now, those of fundamentally changing the Middle East and liberating the Iraqi people, it would have been clear demonstration, however wrong-headed one may have believed him to be, of bold leadership. Instead, the president chose the path of least resistance, capitalizing on the country's post-Sept. 11th fears and putting front and center the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
However much Bush may have believed what he was saying at the time, the primary reason he gave for the war has turned out to be fiction, and any president who takes the nation into war under false pretenses deserves to have his leadership capability called into doubt.
Anthony Resnick is a Trinity junior. His column appears every third Thursday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.