The mainstream changes course
by dj moonbat
A common illness afflicts many pundits across the broad middle of American public opinion: An unremitting need to be right. People express noble-sounding sentiments in ways that allow them to deny the responsibility when those sentiments lead to awful result.
One reason I like Colby King from the Washington Post is that he tries to write the truth as he sees it. That truth may not be all that nuanced, and I may not agree with it all the time, but he's not trying to have it all.
In King's op-ed from this morning's WaPo, you'll find a columnist willing to admit what most centrist pundits simply can't: He was taken in.
Wednesday, Feb. 5,when Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the United Nations to tell the rest of the world what the Bush administration knew about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a stockpile of them. And as if to underscore their confidence in the intelligence on which Powell's speech was to base his unqualified declarations, the Bush administration arranged for CIA Director George Tenet also to be seated in the Security Council chamber.
That day Powell, a highly decorated former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced me and plenty of others that Iraq, already in violation of U.N. resolutions, continued to harbor and build weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein was a threat to this country and must be disarmed. I wrote as much in a column the following Saturday.
The ensuing mail wasn't pretty. A former Army lieutenant, I soldiered on.
Well, now Iraq is occupied; so are our troops, trying to stay alive. Occupation forces are struggling mightily to bring democracy and electricity to Iraq, not necessarily in that order. But the big question lingers: Where are those weapons of mass destruction?
I've come to discover -- belatedly some might say -- that the Bush administration is great at changing the subject when it comes to Iraq. Pro-administration revisionists would now have us think that the March invasion was really, truly, cross-their-hearts-and-hope-to-die all about liberating Iraqis from a tyrannical regime and bringing democracy to that country and its Arab neighbors.
Whoa.
That's not what Powell told the world. There wasn't a word in his speech about transforming the Arab world. Powell's message was all about the dangers we faced and how time was a wastin.' "The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world," he told the United Nations. Weapons of mass destruction "are real and present dangers to the region and the world."
He described a frightening future unless the world acted quickly. "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few months or years is not an option," Powell said. And he left no doubt that the United States had the goods on Iraq. "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid evidence."
So where are the "real and present dangers?" The administration's failure to produce the goods is deeply troubling, especially for those of us who bought what Powell was selling.
The ideologues of the right will likely never admit that this whole adventure was a lie. And ideologues of the left like myself never doubted that it was a lie to begin with.
But the vast, mushy middle is waking up to the terrible facts. It's refreshing to see that somebody out there can admit he didn't actually see through the whole scam to begin with. Right about now, America could use a whole lot more people being honest with themselves.