Day: December 7, 2002

Okay, so now the game is truly afoot. Iraq has its declaration to the United Nations, and now the fun starts.
First, an observation: Why does the AP story on this event say the following:
The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world Saturday a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
What we know of this document is that it is apparently 12,000 pages long, and that, as of now, nobody but the Blix team has access to it (not even the Security Council — but hold that thought).
Now, yes, the story quotes Lt.-Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi general who prepared the document, as stating flatly that they have no WMDs.
But that doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is what is actually in the document, as I understand it. And bottom line is, we won’t know that for several days, at least.
(Absurd, you say, why would he say that if the declaration didn’t actually back it up? First, think about who you are talking about here, and second, you don’t think there’s a vast amount of room for arguments of definition (“The Iraqi people do not consider sarin gas a WMD…”) in this situation?)
Bottom line: is it clearly premature to be saying that Iraq has “formally declared” that they have no WMDs. We just don’t know that.
But ok, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the declaration does say, in terms everybody can agree with, that Iraq has no WMDs. What happens then?
Well, one of two things happen:
1) The Bush administration presents some very hard evidence that it has been holding in reserve as to specific Iraqi violations, thereby showing all those who have been whining about the lack of specifics up until now exactly why they haven’t gotten them yet. (And not incidentally, restoring some of my faith that this President is serious).
2) Nothing much at all happens for a few weeks, in which case I start getting very, very worried.
Incidentally, about this whole flap regarding the disclosure of the declaration to the Security Council. Seems to me this is likely a communications snafu, not any serious disagreement.
I say this partly because, when I heard of it, the idea of not wanting to release the full document to a wide audience actually made some sense. The argument, as I understood it, was that the disclosure could very well take the form of something close to a how-to guide for a nation that wanted to pursue nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
When you remember that currently, Syria is on the Security Council, it starts to make a bit more sense why maybe giving that document out to everyone might not be such a hot idea, doesn’t it?
But this, of course, just points out a basically insoluable problem; you can’t get around the fact that Syria is a SC member, so they’ve got as much of a right as anyone to see the sensitive info, according to UN rules. Just yet another problem with ascribing moral and legal authority to a body that is nothing more than the sum of its (rather imperfect) parts…

Hesiod a comment on my Betrayal of Faith post which I thought required a response. Here’s his comment in full:
Nope.
It means us “liberals” WERE right all along.
Any trained monkey could have figured out that we needed to invade Afghanistan.
And the VAST majority of liberals and Democrats AGRRED with that move.
But…once Dubyah got fixated on Saddam…and he started trying to compromise our national security by kissing Saudi butt, and covering up his administration’s screw-up pre-/911…we got the picture.
Too bad it’s taken you this long to understand what we already knew: Dubyah is an emperor waiting to happen.
Or rather, he’s arrogant, stupid, narrowminded, and ruthless.
All that would be bad enough if he were merely venal and powerhungry.
But…he’s also “on a mission.”
He’s a true believer in his own myth.
He’s a neo-utopian nutcase.
It’s time to fight him with every legal and constitutional means at our disposal.
First, Hesiod, there were plenty of liberals who opposed invading Afghanistan. If you were not among them, then good for you, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a significant number carping about it before (and after).
The fact that Bush is not full dealing with all of our terrorist problems at this moment (Saudi Arabia) doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong in dealing with one of them (Iraq).
I won’t pretend to have a huge degree of confidence in the administration’s conduct towards Saudi Arabia based on their actions thus far, but I hold out a shred of hope that they will deal properly with the House of Saud once Iraq (and possibly Iran) have been helped to establish a beachhead for civilized democracy in the region.
But we’ll see. Your problem, Hesiod, is that your hatred for Bush blinds you to the merits or flaws in his actual policies. He supports something, so therefore you seem to reflexively oppose it.
This is just as bad (worse, actually) then blindly supporting Bush regardless of what he does. It’s worse because Bush is clearly not a torturing, mass murdering dictator, although perhaps he does have some of the negative qualities you ascribe to him.
I had a thought recently about the way our prejudices guide our thinking — how the positions that we have taken up to the present necessarily influence which side in a given conflict gets the benefit of the doubt when the situation is murky.
I thought about my support for Bush and his administration, and my natural distrust of Hussein; of the Taliban; of the PLO and of Arafat.
Was I leaning too far to one side?
And I concluded that even if I was, so be it. If after I am gone, on my tombstone is written this epitaph:
“He gave the benefit of the doubt too little to those who deliberately murdered innocents to serve their cause, and too much to those who opposed them.”
Well, then, I think I’m just fine with that.