[Peace-discuss] Re: Mon. forum on campus

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I spent an unconscionable amount of time this evening listening to
supposedly academic gentlemen say things like (a) this war had nothing to
do with oil, and (b) what the media present is just what the public wants.  
Fellow sufferers included Messrs. Brussel and Kagan, so you can see if I'm
making it up -- and I admit there were some brighter moments. But when I
got home I found -- surprisingly enough in the NYT -- a cogent account of
(part of) the current situation.  Regards, Carl]


	April 29, 2003
	Matters of Emphasis
	By PAUL KRUGMAN

"We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News. "But it
was just a matter of emphasis." The official was referring to the way the
administration hyped the threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the United
States. According to the ABC report, the real reason for the war was that
the administration "wanted to make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials
acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements to make him, from their
standpoint, the perfect target."

A British newspaper, The Independent, reports that "intelligence agencies
on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave
political leaders were distorted in the rush to war." One "high-level
source" told the paper that "they ignored intelligence assessments which
said Iraq was not a threat."

Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of mass destruction. It's
hard to believe that we won't eventually find some poison gas or crude
biological weapons. But those aren't true W.M.D.'s, the sort of weapons
that can make a small, poor country a threat to the greatest power the
world has ever known. Remember that President Bush made his case for war
by warning of a "mushroom cloud." Clearly, Iraq didn't have anything like
that -- and Mr. Bush must have known that it didn't.

Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some people say that it
doesn't: we won, and the Iraqi people have been freed. But we ought to ask
some hard questions -- not just about Iraq, but about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001 the World Health
Organization -- the same organization we now count on to protect us from
SARS -- called for a program to fight infectious diseases in poor
countries, arguing that it would save the lives of millions of people
every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would have been about $10
billion per year -- a small fraction of what we will spend on war and
occupation. Yet the Bush administration contemptuously dismissed the
proposal.

Or consider one of America's first major postwar acts of diplomacy:
blocking a plan to send U.N. peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French
colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war. The U.S. complains that
it will cost too much. And that must be true -- we wouldn't let innocent
people die just to spite the French, would we?

So it seems that our deep concern for the Iraqi people doesn't extend to
suffering people elsewhere. I guess it's just a matter of emphasis. A
cynic might point out, however, that saving lives peacefully doesn't offer
any occasion to stage a victory parade.

Meanwhile, aren't the leaders of a democratic nation supposed to tell
their citizens the truth?

One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original
case for war has turned out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most
Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.'s. Each potential find gets
blaring coverage on TV; how many people catch the later announcement -- if
it is ever announced -- that it was a false alarm? It's a pattern of
misinformation that recapitulates the way the war was sold in the first
place. Each administration charge against Iraq received prominent
coverage; the subsequent debunking did not.

Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to question the
administration's credibility? Some strange things certainly happened. For
example, in September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic Energy Agency
report that he said showed that Saddam was only months from having nuclear
weapons. "I don't know what more evidence we need," he said. In fact, the
report said no such thing -- and for a few hours the lead story on MSNBC's
Web site bore the headline "White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq."
Then the story vanished -- not just from the top of the page, but from the
site.

Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and muted or suppressed
retractions, the American public probably believes that we went to war to
avert an immediate threat -- just as it believes that Saddam had something
to do with Sept. 11.

Now it's true that the war removed an evil tyrant. But a democracy's
decisions, right or wrong, are supposed to take place with the informed
consent of its citizens. That didn't happen this time. And we are a
democracy -- aren't we?

	Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company