Dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.
For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam.
Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't know whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim — a claim supported by a number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, Britain sold Iraq a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no business declaring "we have found the weapons of mass destruction."
Meanwhile, our supine media has begun to wake from slumber and to realize there is actually a story here that the American people might want to read. AP:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties...
The slowdown comes after checks of more than 230 sites — drawn from a master intelligence list compiled before the war — turned up none of the chemical or biological weapons the Bush administration said it went after Saddam Hussein to destroy.
Still, President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to make weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons program," he said.
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said work will resume at a brisk pace once its 1,300-person Iraq Survey Group takes over.
Ahead of the war, planners were so certain of the intelligence that the weapons teams were designed simply to secure chemical and biological weapons rather than investigate their whereabouts, as U.N. inspectors had done.
"Faith," says the Bible, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb.11:1). It's starting to look like aWol took us to war based on faith, not on fact.