Be scared. Be very, very scared
By JEFFREY SIMPSON
Saturday, February 7, 2004 - Page A25
Scared? You should be. A crazy, uncertain, dangerous world lurks out there.
Pakistan's nuclear chief sells secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya, only to receive a pardon from Pakistan's dictator-cum-president, thereby furthering Pakistan's growing reputation as the world's most dangerous country.
North Korea has nuclear weapons and a megalomaniac dictator. The Middle East is full of terrorists. Al-Qaeda is around, threatening Western countries, including Canada. Remember that Osama bin Laden put Canada on his hit list. A suicide bomber in Kabul killed a Canadian solider and injured three others.
Intelligence agencies are supposed to forewarn and protect us. Maybe they do, and for good reasons we don't know about it.
We know when they flop, as when U.S. agencies failed to detect the imminent terrorist attacks of 9/11. And now, if you believe the story, they misread the evidence that led political leaders in Washington and London to insist urgently and repeatedly that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was willing and ready to use them, either directly or through his terrorist friends.
It turns out, as skeptics believed at the time, that the claims were hooey. Nations went to war, and soldiers died or were wounded, not for the post facto humanitarian reasons now being offered, but for two assertions now demonstrated to be false.
It is hard to know which possibility is scarier: that a massive and systemic intelligence failure occurred (again), or that politicians, determined to make war, misread or disregarded the intelligence. You should be scared either because the Western world's two largest intelligence agencies are incompetent, or their leaders are liars or zealots. You should also be profoundly skeptical the next time, if you weren't the last time, if these leaders ever claim that war is needed because the intelligence requires it.
David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector and CIA adviser, recently provoked consternation in the Bush administration by stating that months of fruitless searching had persuaded him that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq prior to the U.S.-led invasion.
Whoosh was the sound of the carpet being pulled from beneath the great war leader, President George W. Bush. Back came the memory of the bellicose speech by Vice-President Dick Cheney before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. And the hair-raising descriptions by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. And the multimedia show by Secretary of State Colin Powell before the United Nations Security Council. And the echoes from British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Don't you remember them all, with the scary descriptions of clear intent and imminent danger, and with the war drums pounding and the conservative commentators hyperventilating?
Whether Americans will remember in sufficient numbers to defeat the Bush/Cheney team -- the deceived or the deceivers, depending on your perspective -- will be known in the November election.
The world remembers in a variety of troubling ways. Everywhere, respect for the United States has fallen sharply. Canada is one of the few remaining countries where attitudes towards the United States and Americans remain more positive than negative, although Canadians widely dislike the Bush administration.
This week, the U.S. State Department official in charge of public diplomacy told Congress that her country's standing abroad had deteriorated so much that "it will take many years or hard, focused work to restore it." In about three years, the Bush administration turned worldwide sympathy for the United States into the situation she described.
Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington the other day to repair frayed bilateral relations. He's friendly, but only 15 per cent of his fellow countrymen now have a favourable image of the United States. For Turkey, substitute the name of many countries.
Who will, therefore, stand with the United States in the next crisis -- and there will be one, somewhere, somehow -- when the people of the world are so disillusioned, even hostile, to the superpower run by this particular administration?
A superpower with so few willing allies is an unsettling prospect, and not just for thoughtful Americans. It is unsettling too, for all who believe, as democrats should everywhere -- even if congenitally anti-Americans nestled in the Canadian pseudo-intelligentsia cannot -- that the United States, at its best, is a force for good in the world.
Investigations into the intelligence failures will now begin in the United States and Britain. In Washington, they will stretch on past the election, which is what the Bush administration wants.
What they will likely not study are the motivations of the administration hawks who settled on war long before the invasion, and so read the intelligence as they wished, because eliminating Saddam Hussein's regime fitted their view of the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, the safety of Israel and the war on terrorism.
Ideology, nationalism and moralism, when combined, were too strong for realism, doubt, international law and evidence.
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