If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson said, then it is the first refuge of politicians. That at least is the case with the Republican National Committee -- and by implication the White House -- which has started running a television commercial defending George Bush's handling of the Iraq war, saying the president's various Democratic opponents are attacking him "for attacking the terrorists." Not really. It's for doing such a bad job of it.
This despicable attempt to muffle criticism by throwing the flag over it may or may not work. Whatever the case, it does not change the fact that the United States went into Iraq for reasons that now appear specious and so distantly related to the war on terrorism that the connection seems merely rhetorical. Saddam Hussein lives and Osama bin Laden lives and yet somehow the Bush White House wants nothing but congratulations. Mine will have to wait.
More to the point, none of the reasons the administration gave for attacking Iraq -- and none of the reasons cited in the congressional resolution authorizing the war -- have proved to be true. As of yet, the United States has found no connection between Hussein and al Qaeda and no evidence that Iraq had an extensive WMD program, particularly one that was about to go nuclear. It remains true that Hussein was a beast with an appalling human rights record, but as bad as he was -- or is -- that was not the reason the administration gave for going to war.
I would like to believe that some well-intentioned people simply misread the intelligence data and concluded what they already thought they knew -- namely that Hussein posed such a grave threat to U.S. security that he had to be dealt with pronto. After all, it's not as if former Clinton administration officials who had only recently seen some of the same intelligence were jumping up and down demanding to know where the Bush administration was coming from. On the contrary, many of them supported the war.
Yet, as Thomas Powers, an expert on intelligence, points out in the current New York Review of Books, Colin Powell "made 29 claims about Iraqi weapons, programs, behaviors, events and munitions" in his United Nations presentation, and none of them have yet been borne out. His was the best and the most detailed case the administration presented, down to the tonnage of chemical weapons, and I found it convincing at the time. I now feel taken. If Powell feels the same way, he's entitled -- but he ain't saying.
If there was merely an intelligence failure, it was massive and inexcusable. Yet, from CIA Director George Tenet to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, every high official has remained on the job. They helped lead the United States into a war that may not have been necessary and may ultimately prove a debacle. Still, not a single administration official has been held accountable.
The other possibility is that they -- the top people in the Bush administration -- knew the stated grounds for war were bogus. If that's the case, then we do not have a thrilling exercise in presidential power but an abuse of it that makes Watergate look as trivial as Richard Nixon's defenders said it was. The two GIs whose bodies were mutilated in Iraq the other day -- just to cite two American casualties -- may have died for a lie.
Mistakes can be rectified, although the consequences of this one are hard to exaggerate. But an abuse of constitutional power is a different matter, and it is this we must all begin considering. It is possible -- actually, more than possible -- that a clique of defense intellectuals either snookered the president into going to war or did so with his full cooperation. If this was done, then it represents a grave and reprehensible breach of faith with the American people. We cannot now pull out of Iraq. But we can and we must determine how we got there.
And about the only way to find out what really happened is through the political process. This is especially the case because the Senate has gone from being the world's greatest deliberative body to the world's greatest rubber stamp. Naturally and predictably, the White House would like to avoid any accounting whatever and is likely to respond to criticism with demagogic appeals to patriotism. I hope it doesn't work. I love my country and I love the truth and I always thought the best thing about being an American is that you don't have to choose.