Reasons To Believe

America and the Bush Administration are taking a worldwide and much-deserved beating after Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said yesterday that the US "did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass murder." For instance, the Candian Globe and Mail reports that "US Changes Reason for Invading Iraq." Rumsfeld's comments come on the heels of a White House announcement that a previous assertion that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Africa was false. President Bush had included the accusation in his January 28 State of the Union address, even though Sec. of State Powell refused one week later to make the same claim to the United Nations.

Since Iraqi WMDs are proving elusive at best, this is certainly not going to help the standing of the United States in the global community. Unilateralism is one thing -- something I most definitely can approve of -- but ginning up fake rationales is quite another. Indeed, conservatives like Dan Pipes have taken things even further than the Administration, arguing that:

Talk about political damage control!! Using a public justification that is different from the hidden internal reason for the Iraq war, and one that is increasingly being shown to be based on false or overstated intelligence, makes the Iraq invasion seem much more like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- a deliberate lie that launched the Vietman War -- than the liberation mission it was advertised as to the American people and the world at large.

 Posted by glenn