Dynamist Blog

WANTED: AN ARTICULATED CAUSE

Listening to President Bush's speech today, I found myself sympathizing with Josh Marshall's post on the problems of a vaguely articulated cause. The problem isn't that Bush is inarticulate, though he's no great speaker. The problem is that the administration deliberately obfuscates about who and why we are fighting. A "war on terror" is like a war on tanks--it's a war on a tactic, not an enemy. If al Qaeda had hit the Pentagon with a missile rather than a civilian airliner, that attack on a military target wouldn't have been an act of terrorism, but it would have been an act of war. And there's no reason to think al Qaeda wouldn't have used a missile if it could have.

Because the administration won't say bluntly who and why we're fighting, it tends either to step on its own strategy or to mislead the public about the reasons for U.S. actions. No, I don't think the Bush administration "lied" about weapons of mass destruction; Occam's Razor suggests that officials were in fact worried abou that threat. But I think the administration overemphasized the importance of WMD, compared to other reasons for intervening, to placate the State Department, the "international community," and the Saudis. Getting rid of Saddam reduces the chances of Islamicist terrorism on American soil, but not merely by ending his WMD programs, whatever their status.

I'm sympathetic to the diplomatic reasons for not spelling out certain goals, such as the pressures a U.S-friendly Iraq puts on the Saudis. But Bush's vagueness is maddening to people who are paying attention and confusing to people who aren't. (Unlike Josh, I'm neither a Wilsonian nor a Bush basher--I voted for him once and expect to do so again--but that doesn't mean we can't agree about this.)

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