Why we must attack Iraq right now
 

Today, the self-prophesied deadline for death, I have been asked more than ever before the general question: why do you think we're attacking Iraq?  And my answer is always: do you mean why are we attacking Iraq, or why are we attacking Iraq right now?  Because I think these are two very different questions.  Why we're attacking Iraq is one I can't answer.  Bush says it's because Hussein is a bad guy who sponsors terrorism, others wink and say it's the oil.  Some say it's a religious war, some say it's payback somehow for 9/11.  Just looking at the atlas, I'd say it sure is interesting that we'll be occupying little Afghanistan (remember them?) and Iraq - sort of puts Iran in the middle there, with a single front into Syria and Saudi Arabia.  I know nothing of military strategy, but I know a good spot on the board when I see one.  But how much any of these things play to what players in the White House is generally unknown to me, and probably to you as well.

But as for why we are attacking Iraq right now, I'm afraid I can find only one possibility, and that is no less than the survival of the Republican party.  

See, in the midst of the political machinations I described in the last opinion, Bush and Co. justified their whole position to the UN on the grounds that Iraq had biological, chemical and nuclear weapons testing and production going on inside the country.  Iraq, of course, said it did not, and the UN resolution 1441 was accepted across the board because it contained, among other things, the provisions for establishing the veracity of these claims.  This was considered by the weapons inspectors to be primary in their tasks, remember: to see whether they had these weapons, and if so to destroy them.  Forgot that, did you?  It was much later that the Bush team revealed their plan to presume the answer to this investigation by claiming that since they had not revealed these weapons which we know they have to the inspectors, they had violated the resolution and must be blasted to oblivion.  This presumption of the answer to the very question under investigation was not particularly clever, but it worked for the American public, which is never much into details.  And I must note that our press never even brought it up.  The BBC was filled with such quotes from foreign ambassadors, but I never saw a single one in any American mainstream press report.

But whatever the effect of these strange arguments, under the bright light of fair inquiry things did not go well for Team Bush.  The leader of the nuclear weapons inspection team said early on that they would be able to tell whether Iraq had started a campaign with or without 'proactive' cooperation from Iraq.  This meant that the justifications Bush took to the UN would be put to the test.  And the US was failing this test miserably.  The report to the council several weeks ago stated unequivocally that Iraq had not started or tried to start a nuclear weapons program of any kind, and that in fact they had not the capacity to start one if they wanted to.  Worse, to keep the UN from deserting us entirely early on, the Administration had presented 'evidence' of their nuclear program.  Damning evidence, they called it.  The world would be blind not to see it.

Bad move.  The evidence all proved unfounded.  The potential use of those rods took the character, even in the most diplomatic terms,  of a wild accusation.  And that smoking gun memo suggesting that Iraq tried to import uranium from Niger, after what the inspectors called an exhaustive investigation, proved to be 'inauthentic' (diplomacy-speak for 'a forgery').  That was a bad day in the UN.  But strangely, and I believe tellingly, not as bad a day in the US as Powell must have thought.  The US press asked the fleeting question or two about the competency of US intelligence, but never noted that if US intelligence is actually competent enough to know if a document is authentic or not (and most of us think they are), then US allegations about Iraq's nuclear program were bald-faced lies.  Interesting, since of course that was the inescapable conclusion of the world community.  Perhaps this kind of 'reporting' explains some of the disconnect between the American public and the rest of the world?

Bush, for his part, stopped claiming that Iraq was working on nukes, and concentrated on the general term 'weapons of mass destruction', which, by the way, includes dynamite.  His charge that they had chemical and biological weapons had not yet been conclusively proven to be false, although the inspectors found nothing with their surprise inspections, and the general feeling was that this charge, too, could easily turn out to be unfounded.  US intelligence in this matter had also turned up nothing, and Powell's accusations that Iraq moved these plants around in mobile units was determined to be impossible.  The turning point came when Hans Blix, lead inspector for UNSCOM, told the UN that at the current level of Iraqi cooperation, the question of whether they had or were making such weapons would be conclusively determined in a matter of months.

I have been asked recently whether I believe the Iraqis have chemical or biological weapons.  I, of course, am not in a position to say.  But Bush and his crew at least doubt that they do, and may even believe that they do not.  What is telling here is that what Bush needs most on the world stage is credibility, and were such weapons discovered by the UN, he would have it.  At most such a discovery would have taken a couple months, and Iraq of course wouldn't have been able to threaten anybody in that span of time.  But if Blix was allowed to go to the UN and announce that in fact Iraq had none of these weapons, Bush's political career would have ended abruptly, and quite possibly no Republican would hold the president's office for the next decade.  For his sake and the sake of his party, Bush's sole and repetitious justifications to the American people could not be proven false in open investigation.

And that is why we are going to war with Iraq right now.

Do I believe they have these weapons?  I have already said I am in no position to tell.  Will they 'find' such weapons?  Oh yes, they most certainly will.