Sen. Jay
Rockefeller, an intelligent and resourceful liberal, was made
to listen to part of a statement he made in 2002. In that statement
he spoke of the alarming developments within Iraq, of Saddam Hussein
attempting the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, of
the long reach of his aggressive appetites, extending even into
Niger in search of yellowcake uranium.
"You
want to revise and amend those words, senator?" Wolf Blitzer
asked him on CNN.
"Of
course. I mean, I was dead flat wrong. ... I'm on the Intelligence
Committee, and as soon as we did our report on weapons of mass
destruction, I realized that I had just been living off this information,
this false information. And I went down to the floor of the Senate
and I said, Look, I'm wrong. I would never vote for a war knowing
what I know now."
OK.
Now two questions
arise from this experience. The first is: Should President Bush
have urged a military operation against Saddam Hussein on evidence
that proved to be either wrong or insubstantial, sometimes both?
The second question is: How do we account for the terrible misestimations
of our intelligence services? We learned only on Tuesday that
we are spending $44 billion per year to gather intelligence. It's
always wrong to assume that there is a correlation between the
amount of money spent and productivity, but what reason is there
to be confident that critical personnel in the CIA and in the
DOD will go on other than to receive Presidential Medals of Freedom?
But of course
there is an overarching irresolution here. If we agree with Senator
Rockefeller that we ought not to have gone to war, we are still
left with the fact that we did go to war. This imposes on the
president a running responsibility to vitalize the argument for
going to war. One presidential critic over the weekend objected
that an entire year had gone by since President Bush had said
anything substantial in the matter of the Iraq war: Why does he
not bring us up to date on it regularly?
There is
only the obvious answer to that question: What would he say? There
are the individual skirmishes, covered by the newspapers -- a
salient in Husayba, the ambush aborted, the advance toward constitutional
order by this or the other Sunni tribe.
One supposes
that no national leader, in wartime, would feel any need to publicize
that day's defeats. That would make sense only if it served to
stress the larger picture that forwarded the national purpose.
There are such opportunities, for instance the elections, past
and forthcoming, which suggest a corporate Iraqi desire for freedom
and civil order.
But the regime
change the president seeks, and has boasted of, cannot be transcribed
in spotty events invigoratingly enough to relay to the republic
a sense of purpose-being-achieved. It has to be for this reason
that we hear so little from the president on the subject of Iraq.
When this is combined with an apparent indifference to recomposing
our intelligence community, the idea is given of executive lassitude
in wartime, and that is greatly damaging to the public morale.
Granted Mr.
Bush has other difficulties. But it is not safe to conclude that
they are unrelated to his central problem, which is the Iraq war.
He has presided over gratifying months in the national economy
and responded to the demands of the judiciary; his efforts include
the adroit selection of successors to Alan Greenspan and William
Rehnquist. But these are not accomplishments that endow his administration
with the kind of international respect the United States deserves,
and is forlorn without. His Latin American exposure as advocate
of hemispheric free trade was a substantial failure, and not alone
traceable to the provincialism of individual Latin American republics,
or the passionate socialist demagogy of President Chavez.
It was concluded
by some friends of the president that he made a mistake in going
to Mar del Plata. National leaders shouldn't decide where to go,
let alone what to do, to avoid student protests. With a little
hype you could organize a student protest against the promulgation
of the Bill of Rights or the unveiling of the Venus de Milo.
Still, national
prestige hangs to an important extent on the figure of the leader,
and when he is demeaned, so is our cause. The challenge is one
of leadership.
