David Bromwich, writing in The New York Review, performs the work of a vivisectionist on Karl Rove's Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. Some of us just will not "get over"--the phrase is Antonin Scalia's--Bush v. Gore and we can't forget the case that was made for war in Iraq, either. If not for the former we would have been spared the latter, too. It appears that Rove, in his book, advances the familiar talking points regarding Iraq's nonexistent weapons: it wasn't just Bush, it was members of Congress and the international community, the intelligence agencies, everyone, who had arrived at the conclusion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This conveniently elides some facts.
It is not true, for example, that no one doubted that Iraq had weapons and that it was necessary to go to war. The reason our "coalition" was so small was that the international community did not, in fact, believe the case was strong. Moreover, 23 senators voted against authorizing force in Iraq--21 Democrats plus Independent Jim Jeffords and Republican Lincoln Chafee. (In the House, 133 representatives voted against the resolution authorizing war.) They were right to do so, and Bromwich is right to castigate Rove, who says now that these senators "were 'eager' for party reasons to do 'grave damage to their country's ability to win a war.'" Having been proven right is no defense when the charge is that you are not a patriot.
Besides being false, the claim that "everyone agreed" is transparently lame. Bush was president. More than anyone, he was in a position to know. The consensus, such as it was, arose because he said there was no doubt that Iraq had weapons. When that proved false, it is not very impressive to plead that "everyone thought so"--they thought so because they didn't believe the president would start a war unless he knew it was necessary.
And it wasn't as if it was impossible to know. Bromwich says that Rove's account "removes from view the international dimension of the reporting and inspection of WMDs in Iraq." Yes! I tried to make the same point here. And it is not just Rove. The justifications put forward now by the pro-war faction simply ignore that Iraq, in response to international pressure, had permitted United Nations weapons inpectors to conduct unfettered investigations at sites chosen by the inspectors. These inspections, which began in November of 2002, turned up nothing. By March of 2003, their work was coming toward an end, and Bromwich therefore aptly observes that what might have seemed a reasonable suspicion in September of 2002 appeared very doubtful by March of 2003. That is why there was no vote in the UN Security Council authorizing war and no "coalition" worthy of the name.
I recommend Bromwich's entire article. Do not delay as it may before long withdraw behind a wall requiring a subscription to scale.
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