Silly word games and weapons
of mass destruction
In recent months, Democrats have criticized President Bush for claiming
that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed an imminent threat
to the United States. Ted Kennedy said it. Wes Clark said it. And
plenty of others have, too.
But now Republicans say it’s a bum rap. A chorus of conservative
columnists and talk-show hosts claims that nobody in the administration
ever said any such thing.
“No member of the administration,” conservative commentator
Andrew Sullivan recently wrote, “used the term ‘imminent
threat’ to describe Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. No one. …
[Wesley] Clark is repeating a lie that has been thoroughly exposed
on the Internet and elsewhere, a lie that even The New York Times
has stopped repeating.”
Could this possibly be true? Could all our memories be so faulty?
In a word, no.
Let’s start by looking at what the president’s spokesmen
said about the “imminent threat” claim before things
in Iraq started going sour.
Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: “Ari,
the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent,
that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of
mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in,
unfettered, no conditions, so forth.”
Fleischer’s answer? “Yes.”
In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: “Is [Saddam]
an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the
world or to Americans right here at home.”
Bartlett’s answer? “Well, of course he is.”
A month after the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, “Well,
we went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we
said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the
United States? Isn’t that true?”
Fleischer’s answer? “Absolutely.”
I could go on. But I trust you get the point.
It’s true that administration officials avoided the phrase
“imminent threat.” But in making their argument, Sullivan
and others are relying on a crafty verbal dodge — sort of
like “I didn’t accuse you of eating the cake. All I
said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth.”
The issue is not the precise words the president and his deputies
used but what arguments they made. And on that count, the record
is devastatingly clear.
To call something an imminent threat means that the blow could come
at any moment and that any delay in confronting it risks disaster.
Webster’s defines “imminent” as “ready to
take place; especially: hanging threateningly over one’s head.”
That gets it just about right. The White House described the Iraqi
threat as a sword over our heads, a threat we had to confront now.
With this in mind, consider a few more examples.
Here’s how Vice President Cheney described the threat in August
2002: “What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat
is give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness.”
A month later, Bush called Iraq an “urgent threat to America.”
The next month, he described the threat like this: “Iraq could
decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon
to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. … Facing clear
evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the
smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Or Fleischer two days after that: “Another way to look at
this is if Saddam Hussein holds a gun to your head even while he
denies that he actually owns a gun, how safe should you feel?”
Or the president justifying war as it got under way: “The
people of the United States and our friends and allies will not
live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with
weapons of mass murder.”
For more than six months, Bush and his top deputies told Americans
that Iraq posed a grave, immediate and imminent threat. Delay risked
horrors like WMD terrorist handoffs or mushroom clouds billowing
over American cities.
Some now point to statements in which they seem to declaim the idea
of an imminent threat. In the State of the Union, for instance,
the president said: “Some have said we must not act until
the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced
their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?
If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions,
all words and all recriminations would come too late.”
But here the president isn’t ruling out an “imminent
threat,” but rather just bending the concept out of all recognition
by arguing that the threat will be “imminent” only when
we get a formal warning from the potential attackers. And that’s
just more of the same rhetorical gobbledygook and obfuscation.
Critics like Sullivan want to put the onus on Democrats to untangle
these silly word games if they want to talk about what we all know
happened in the run-up to the war.
But that’s just not how it works. Just as they can’t
undo what they did, the White House and its supporters can’t
undo what they said.
There’s no use denying it. It was only a year ago. We were
there. We remember.
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