WMD Gone MIA Should Spell RIP for the Bush Doctrine

 David Alan Black 

Before ordering the invasion that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, President Bush referred to an imminent threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a prime justification for war. However, U.S. forces in Iraq searching for evidence of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons have yet to find any. A draft report on the search for WMD in Iraq provides no solid evidence that Iraq had such arms when the United States invaded the country in March. Officials will go no further than to say that the search has uncovered documents pointing to a program to develop such weapons. U.S. weapons inspector David Kay has said that, while no WMD have yet been found in Iraq, there is “substantial evidence” that Iraq planned to make chemical and biological arms.

This is a frightening development. Our nation prides itself on the concept of free speech contained in the First Amendment to our Constitution. It is the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights. Yet the practice of exaggerating intelligence reports and relying on rumor to influence public opinion now seems to be widely accepted within political circles as the normal way of doing business. Americans should be outraged when the current administration hides behind a curtain of PR spin while sending hundreds of Americans to their deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq. It appears that the legacy of the Clinton administration is still with us. As things stand now, people wonder whether they will ever be able to trust their government again.

The bottom line is that with the election of George W. Bush and the tragedy of 9/11 a new vision of American replaced the original vision of our Founders. This new vision is one of an America that would use its military power to crush tyrannical regimes and establish America-like democracies in their place. This is a far cry from the “humbler” foreign policy that Bush the candidate spoke of. The result is a well-intended but poorly thought-out policy clearly driven by political ambition and (some would even say) personal enrichment.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis once warned, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Today unprincipled men and women, disdainful of their moral heritage and skeptical of truth itself, are destroying our civilization by weakening the very pillars upon which it rests. For Americans to ignore this crisis is to commit a mistake that could well prove fatal to our republican form of government.

October 20, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. He is currently finishing his latest book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

Back to daveblackonline