By DeWayne Wickham
USA TodayNovember 18, 2002
With just a few weeks to go before control of the Senate officially shifts to the Republicans, the fault line between the White House and Democrats over war with Iraq — thought to be just a sliver after congressional passage of the war resolution — has widened.
In separate meetings last week with members of The Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists, Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration's national security adviser, and Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the lame-duck chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, differed over virtually every aspect of this looming conflict.
"The guys who have to fight this war don't think it's a good idea," said Biden, the Senate's leading Democrat on foreign affairs. To buttress his point, Biden recounted a recent conversation he had with an unnamed chairman of one of the military services, who told him that a U.S. war with Iraq would be "the dumbest thing in the world."
Rice, however, rejected the suggestion that any key military leader doesn't back Bush's Iraq policy.
"I sit with the Joint Chiefs and the president, and it simply isn't true," she said. "The president has asked the Joint Chiefs; the Joint Chiefs are not opposed to this war, and anybody who tells you that they are doesn't know what they are talking about."
Fragmented minority
While Republicans in the new Congress don't have a wide margin in either house, they'll almost certainly be more disciplined than Democrats, who have shown a propensity to break ranks during showdowns with Bush. As a result, the court of public opinion may replace the floor of Congress as the major policy battleground between now and the 2004 elections for politicians such as Biden.
Republicans took "something that nobody, including the president, believes is an imminent danger and moved it up in the election cycle," Biden said of the war resolution Bush got Congress to adopt shortly before this month's midterm elections. (Biden said that after his own more restrictive resolution lost support, he reluctantly backed the one that passed to give Secretary of State Colin Powell the leverage he needed to get the United Nations to adopt a resolution that would slow the Bush administration's rush to war.) There is "zero evidence that Saddam has cooperated with al-Qaeda," Biden told the black columnists.
Rice differed sharply with Biden on this point. She compared Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Saddam's government, she said, "has supported terrorism and harbored terrorists," and as a consequence the Bush administration must be "concerned about the potential union of terrorism, extremism and weapons of mass destruction" because "bad guys travel in packs."
Suspicions, not facts
But it is on emotional arguments such as this that the administration's case for quick action against Saddam's brutal regime breaks down. Pressed by one columnist to explain to the parents of American servicemen and servicewomen why their children might have to die in Iraq, Rice leaned heavily on the administration's fears and suspicions — not hard facts.
"With Saddam Hussein, you have a potential for a homicidal dictator, who has demonstrated that he is ambitious and aggressive in attacking his neighbors to acquire a nuclear weapon," Rice said. For that to "happen in a volatile region like the Middle East is most certainly a future we cannot tolerate," she added.
Democrats must not only question the Bush administration's rationale for war. Those who disagree with it must offer Americans an alternative course of action — one that gives them reasonable assurance that if Saddam survives Bush's wrath, he won't eventually threaten his neighbors or this country with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
The 9/11 attacks have made Americans less likely to second-guess the president's reasons for war with Iraq, if it should come to that, and more willing to give Bush unconditional support if American troops are sent into harm's way.
Biden's willingness to challenge Bush's position on Iraq is good for congressional Democrats, who are in desperate need of a courageous leader. And it's good for the nation — to which much of the world looks for leadership.
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