September 14, 2002

Never Forget What?

andor is so little prized in Washington that you want to shake the hand of anyone who dares commit it. So cheers to Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, for telling The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller the real reason that his boss withheld his full-frontal move on Saddam Hussein until September: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Mr. Card has taken some heat for talking about a war in which many may die as if it were the rollout of a new S.U.V. But he wasn't lying, and history has already proved him right. This campaign has been so well timed and executed that the new product already owns the market. The unofficial motto of the 9/11 anniversary may have been "Never forget," but by 9/12, if not before, the war on Al Qaeda was already fading from memory as the world was invited to test-drive the war on Iraq.

Al Qaeda may be forgotten, but it's not gone — apparently even from the suburbs of Buffalo, as CBS News first reported last night. At least two-thirds of its top leadership remains at large. A draft version of a U.N. report on our failure to shut down its cash flow says that "Al Qaeda is by all accounts `fit and well' and poised to strike again at its leisure." (It has already struck at least a half-dozen times since January.) Regime change, anyone? Al Qaeda almost brought one about in Afghanistan, assuming its likely role in the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai. As Harry Shearer said in his satirical radio program, "Le Show," 9/11 is "the event that changed everything except terrorism."

But on to Iraq. Saddam might "be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year," said George W. Bush to the U.N. on Thursday. Yes, but Pakistan, where The Washington Post recently found two top Qaeda operatives planning new missions with impunity, already has nuclear weapons within terrorists' reach. "Al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq," said Mr. Bush on Thursday. Yes, but there are Qaeda operatives in at least 65 countries, and The Times reported this week that the largest number of them are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran (identified by Mr. Bush's own State Department in May as "the most active state sponsor of terrorism"), Syria and Yemen are not far behind. And then there's our ally, Saudi Arabia: according to USA Today, nearly 80 percent of the hits on a secretive Qaeda Web site since June have come from addresses in the country that also spawned nearly 80 percent of the 9/11 hijackers.

That Iraq is "a grave and gathering danger," as the president also said, is not in doubt. But is it as grave a danger as the enemy that attacked America on 9/11 and those states that are its most integral collaborators? The campaign against Iraq, wrote Brent Scowcroft in the op-ed that launched a thousand others, "is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism." Since major Qaeda attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough.

There is now a "debate" about the new war, but so far it has been largely a parochial Washington affair, largely about process, and soon to be academic. Will President Bush ask Congress for authorization to go after Saddam? Will he consult the Security Council? We now know the answers are yes and yes, and that Congress will not stand in his way. (If the Democrats can't challenge the president about taxes, they certainly won't about war.) The Security Council may now sign on too, to Mr. Bush's rightful demand that the U.N. enforce its own resolutions against Iraq.

But when Saddam in all likelihood balks, we'll go to war, no matter how few our allies. If you think back to that ancient past of summer 2001, you'll recognize the game plan from the White House's several weeks of deliberation over stem-cell research. "He's listening to all sides of the debate," Ari Fleischer said then, even though it was evident from the get-go that Mr. Bush would do pretty much what he always intended after a few weeks of ostentatious "listening."

  
To question the president on Iraq is an invitation to have one's patriotism besmirched. The invective aimed at those with the toughest questions, almost all of them pillars of the Republican or military establishments, has been borderline ugly, complete with the requisite allusions to Neville Chamberlain. But it's hard to find any doubter of the war who wants to appease Saddam or denies that he is an evil player. The question many critics are asking is why he has jumped to the head of the most-wanted list when the war on Al Qaeda remains unfinished and our resources are finite. Even those who can stomach pre-emptive war as a new doctrine wonder if we have our pre-emptive priorities straight.

Peggy Noonan, as faithful a George W. Bush partisan as there is, sharpened the question most pointedly on The Wall Street Journal editorial page on Wednesday, when she implored the president to give us facts instead of sermons in making his case. " `Saddam is evil' is not enough," she wrote. "A number of people are evil, and some are even our friends. `Saddam has weapons of mass destruction' is not enough. A number of countries do. What the people need now is hard data that demonstrate conclusively that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which he is readying to use on the people of the U.S. or the people of the West." (And maybe even the non-West.)

What we have been getting instead is the one thing worse than no data — false data. For months, administration officials have been trying to implicate Iraq in 9/11 with the story of an alleged April 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam spy. But the C.I.A. can find no evidence of this, and the 21-page fact sheet the U.S. released with the president's speech mentions no Saddam-9/11 link at all. As for nuclear arms, last weekend in his appearance with Tony Blair the president referred to a 1998 International Atomic Energy Agency report that said Iraq was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon, adding "I don't know what more evidence we need." Plenty more, as it happens, because an agency spokesman says no such report exists. This is why those who most want to believe Mr. Bush, from a conservative G.O.P. Senate leader like Don Nickles to our allies, keep saying (in Mr. Nickles's words), "You're not giving us enough."

It's this high-handedness that echoes the run-up to Vietnam. The analogy can be overdone, certainly, since today's armed forces are highly unlikely to find Iraq a military quagmire and no one can even try to make a case for the legitimacy of Saddam's regime. But there is a widening credibility gap between the White House's marketing of the war and the known facts. The arrogance of this C.E.O. administration, which gives citizens no better information than companies like Halliburton gave to its stockholders, recalls the hubris of those Ivy League and corporate "whiz kids" on Robert McNamara's Pentagon team who saw themselves as better and brighter than the rest of us.

But on to Iraq. Anyone who believes that Mr. Bush might turn back now has not been following the path of a president who, by his own account, never second-guesses a decision; indeed, we're already ratcheting up our longstanding military engagement with Saddam. As we move from containment to attack mode, though, it might be best to focus less on procedural debates, such as the timing and wording of whatever rubber-stamp approval Congress will deliver, and more on the tougher questions the administration would prefer to ignore.

What happens if Al Qaeda attacks the U.S., or if Afghanistan or Pakistan falls while we're at war in Iraq? Can we continue to meet all our commitments with an all-volunteer army? As budget deficits spiral into the foreseeable future, where will we get the tens of billions of dollars we need to support the post-Saddam Iraq that we will surely inherit? Is Saddam our new focus because he's the most catastrophic threat or is there another agenda that should be spelled out, whether it involves oil or unfinished Bush family business?

This is the candid talk we need to have. Maybe the administration can make the case that we can simultaneously whip Al Qaeda and Saddam, secure Afghanistan for keeps, tame the rest of the "axis of evil," guzzle gas in perpetuity and keep cutting taxes (for some of us). If that's so, and someone else's children will be marching on Baghdad, what patriot would not stand up and say "Let's roll"?