uExpress.com: Ted Rall by Ted Rall -- (02/10/2004) RALL 2/10/04

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02/10/2004

RALL 2/10/04

NEW YORK--The fight over Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction is turning surreal. As one post facto justification for the war after another is erased by incontrovertible reality--the WMD threat by the absence thereof, the Al Qaeda threat by simple logic, the liberation argument by the bombs Iraqis are setting off at every American they can--the Bushies are circulating a list of quotes by such leading Democrats as John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and President Bill Clinton slamming Saddam. Never mind that we impeached Clinton for lying under oath, argue the Republicans. Bush "had the same intelligence [on Iraq] President Clinton had," adds Laura Bush. Now there's a GOP talking point with legs.

In other words, George W. Bush is trying to bolster his sinking credibility by equating his personal integrity to that of Bill Clinton. I won't argue the point, but Karl Rove is losing his touch.

Of course there's a difference. Clinton relied on 1998 intelligence reports in 1998, not in 2003 as Bush did. And he used that now-discredited intel to bomb a few Iraqi radar stations--which, as many Democrats said at the time, he was wrong to do--not to launch a full-scale invasion.

There's nothing new about presidents lying to con us into war. After North Vietnam allegedly fired torpedoes at a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon Johnson convinced Congress to escalate U.S. involvement there. But secret White House tapes recorded LBJ's admission that the attack probably never happened. "When we got through with all the firing," LBJ told secretary of defense Robert McNamara, "we concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all." Though Ronald Reagan claimed that the government of Grenada had to be overthrown in order to save 600 American medical students from Marxist thugs, students "rescued" by U.S. marines quizzically told reporters that they'd never felt menaced. Had they wanted to leave, they said, they could have gone to the airport and boarded a commercial flight.

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Previous military adventures were sold to the American people as acts of self-defense. We were fighting back in response to supposed attacks--or, as in the case of Grenada, an imminent attack. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war, a conflict fought to prevent a likely adversary from drawing first blood in the future, departs from that tradition.

That's new.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, you don't need reliable spies to wage preemptive war. You need soothsayers to divine a nation's technological prowess as well as its leaders' cultural and political motivations. Then, if you want the American people to unite behind you and your war, you must present credible evidence that your target will attack us if we don't hit them first.

It would have been smarter to kick off the Bush Doctrine with an attack on a country that everybody agrees presents a genuine threat, like North Korea. Instead the Bushies rolled out their first preemptive war with all the launch- credibility of New Coke. They trotted out poor Colin Powell to deliver a laundry list of imaginary Iraqi WMDs to the U.N. that he privately called "bullshit," let Rumsfeld go on and on about knowing "exactly" where the WMDs were and hired a handpicked Republican, David Kay, as weapons inspector--a guy who in the end turned out to be too damned honest.

"I expected to find the weapons," Bush told Tim Russert last week. I believe him. They bet everything on that conviction. But Bush knew that he didn't have hard evidence. So he and his cabinet vamped it, figuring that the postwar discovery of vast stockpiles would silence critics. Now that there are no WMDs, the preemptive doctrine is toast. So is presidential credibility. Since Bush has lost his trillion-dollar gamble, it's time for him to pay off the casino and vacate the high rollers' suite.

(Ted Rall is the editor of the new anthology of alternative cartoons "Attitude 2: The New Subversive Social Commentary Cartoonists," containing interviews with and cartoons by 21 of America's best cartoonists. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)