A Pilgrim’s Digression

In a Time article titled Unfinished Business, about the three challenges facing the “new” Iraq (as CNN insists on calling it), Donald Rumsfeld had this to say about the chances of finding WMDs in Iraq:

“Things were mobile. Things were underground. Things were in tunnels. Things were hidden. Things were dispersed. Now, are we going to find that? No, it’s a big country,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. “The inspectors didn’t find anything, and I doubt that we will—what we will do is find the people who will tell us.”

“The inspectors didn’t find anything, and I doubt that we will …” I can picture Rumsfeld before the cameras stating this in his matter-of-factly, impatient way, as if to say “Why are you bothering me with these silly questions?”

The next step is for Rummy and company to begin stating the war was never just about WMDs, just as it was never only about Saddam Hussein. I don’t know how other Americans will feel about it, but the fact that we haven’t found any biological or chemical weapons in Iraq—not even a single vial of anthrax—doesn’t sit too well with me. For me, one of the moments that convinced me we needed to undertake this war was Colin Powell’s speech before the U.N. outlining the extent to which Iraq had amassed weapons of mass destruction. Powell laid everything on the line in that speech—his credibility as well as the credibility of the administration. And I trusted him. I am beginning to wonder if my trust was misplaced. I am not yet ready to admit that much; I do think it’s too soon to make a judgement one way or the other, even though Powell made it sound as if we knew the street address where these weapons were housed and Blix and his inspectors were either blind or willfully blind. That said, if the founding premise of the war turns out to have been a lie, God help George Bush in 2004.