Global Policy Forum

Why Democrats Need to Seize on Bush's WMD Lies

By Michael Tomasky

The extent of the Bush administration's abuse of intelligence and propagandizing on behalf of this "optional war," as George Will casually called it, is at this point clear to anyone watching. So are the recent and continuing lies and fictions. To take one of the most striking: Donald Rumsfeld said on March 30 that we knew precisely that weapons of mass destruction were in and around Tikrit and Baghdad; Condoleezza Rice said Sunday, "No one ever said that we knew precisely where" the weapons caches were.

In fact, matters reached the point of comedy this week as we watched George W. Bush define deviousness down from "weapons of mass destruction" to a mere "weapons program," a criterion by which we would be obligated to invade virtually every nation on earth except Monaco (although even the pesky Monegasques, being sort of French and all, aren't above suspicion). The question for Democrats now: How to make Americans care?

We're living in times that I don't even know how to describe. It's pretty hard to understand what's happening in this society when the majority leader of the House of Representatives makes use of a presidential agency for the nakedly political purpose of hunting down some home-state legislators. And when that agency complies with the request. And when it's a little two-day story, not a scandal at all. One doesn't even have to ask, in this case, the hypothetical that liberals are prone to present -- to wit, imagine if the Clinton administration had been involved in something similar. No; this would have been a scandal, and properly so, if it involved a federal agency under any administration from Bill Clinton to Dwight Eisenhower. But not now.

Under most normal circumstances, too, the Iraq War would have been a scandal. There are many reasons historically why war for a democracy should be a last resort. One of those reasons is precisely that the democratic commander in chief must answer to the people who elected him, and those people include the soldiers he is sending off to die (and their spouses and their mothers). Read any study of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or any American president contemplating war and you will see that, after the strategic and political calculations were run through at staff meetings, in the end it was the president, alone with his conscience, deciding whether he would be able to look a grieving mother in the eye and tell her that her son's death was essentially unavoidable.

That's a very human consideration for war, and it's a very democratic one as well. It reminds the leader that his power is derived not from divine right or genealogical caprice or imperial ukase but from the governed.

But when you bullied your way into office in obvious contravention of the will of the people, what difference does all that hoo-ha make? Humility is a quality that candidate Bush talked up, but after Florida, and especially after September 11 created an opening for a new posture of aggression, humility was just another word for guilt. And so, instead of carefully placed stories about a president wrestling with his conscience, we got carefully leaked stories telling us that his conscience was clear and he was sleeping like a baby. (A reporter's question about this to Colin Powell brought Powell's priceless reply that he slept like a baby, too: "Every two hours I wake up screaming." Powell at that point was on the precipice of making his distortion-rich Feb. 5 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, so I think we know what might have been on his conscience.)

And while Bush was in this serene state, he and his servants were out on the hustings selling the American people a story about an imminent threat that did not exist in order to gin up public support for sending young Americans off to risk death. Hey, why lose sleep over that?

But again: How to make people care? Let's face it: It may be that they never will. For most Americans, the bottom line will be that we won. Even if no weapons of mass destruction are found, Bush will essentially say, as he has already, What the heck, the Iraqi people are free. And most Americans will probably accept that, especially with the media -- including a few prominent liberal columnists -- urging them to do so.

Democrats are stepping forward now to put more pressure on the administration. And it's nice to see Democratic presidential candidates other than Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean talking about weapons of mass destruction. Democrats should keep this pressure up by all means. But they need to do more, too, and for two reasons. First, there's still a chance that some caches will be found, and if that happens the administration and its media servants will see to it that the Democrats are made to look silly and weak.

And second, "Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" is a criticism, not a credible alternative argument. Criticisms bring applause from the already converted; a credible alternative argument can convert waverers. That alternative argument can't be simply that the Iraq War was unnecessary -- counterproductive, even -- and that Bush is a liar. Most Americans, odd as it seems to you and me, won't buy that. They'll only buy a Democratic argument if it persuasively tells people that Bush is deceiving them on security, and here's a way to do it better.

These next few weeks will be crucial in the debate over weapons of mass destruction -- by extension, in the larger debate on national and domestic security, and by further extension, in the presidential race itself. The Democrats need to work to get this moment right.

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