Democrat attacks failing, flailing...

What If People Start Believing That Bush Lied ? by Daniel Henniger


Would Senators Sam Nunn, Pat Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, Chuck Robb, David
Boren or Henry M. Jackson have conducted their opposition to President
Bush's war policies in Iraq as have Senators Harry Reid, Richard
Durbin, Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer? The former group stood for the
idea of a loyal opposition; the latter stand simply in opposition.

In the past week, President Bush, his vice president and defense
secretary have begun to "push back" against the current incarnation of
Democratic opposition. And so the political air drips with such
edifying words as "lied," "dishonest" and Sen. Reid's conclusive "a
vote of no confidence."

Yes, politics ain't beanbag. But there is a larger danger in the
Democratic strategy of attempting to make George Bush into the Wizard
of Oz, a man whose every statement about threats to American security
is fantasy and falsity. Pounding through the media that the prewar
intelligence was a conscious lie may incline the American people to
believe the whole Iraq enterprise is false, and worse, that the very
notion of weapons of mass destruction is also doubtful. The psychology
of the big lie can sometimes run out of control.

The administration, inadvertently, may be contributing to the problem.
In its push-back week, the president and others have cited prewar
Democratic statements of belief that Saddam in fact had WMD, leaving
listeners to conclude that Saddam duped everyone. This too undermines
belief at the margin that any of that WMD stuff is very real, or a
direct threat.

Here is one man's view of why we are in Iraq: We are trying to
democratize this country so they don't try to kill us. That Iraqis
should "get their freedom" is genuinely good and desirable. But I wish
President Bush would say more often that Iraqi democratization is in
our raw self-interest. It doesn't much matter to me whether the country
we democratize is Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Syria. The theory that
democracies don't attack other democracies is as strong as such notions
get, and what the world most needs now is a new, large Islamic
democracy. A democracy, however "imperfect," is less likely than an
authoritarian state to detonate a nuclear device in someone else's
territory.

I am beyond caring in the least what weapons Saddam held in March 2003.
If the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections in Iraq lead to a party-based
government stabilized over time by U.S. troops, then the odds fall that
a large and wealthy adversary will try -- again -- to acquire nuclear
weapons in the open market. Saddam may be gone, but what isn't gone is
the global marketplace and trade in nuclear-weapons material that is
the legacy of the infamous A.Q. Khan network.

In a symposium on the Bush Doctrine for the November issue of
Commentary magazine, I wrote: "September 11 changed a lot, but what
truly 'changed everything' was the revelation of A.Q. Khan's production
network for nuclear-bomb know-how." Khan, the father of Pakistan's
Bomb, created a commercial network in centrifuge designs and parts and
weapons technologies. His nuke catalog flowed through the same global
canals of commerce as legitimate goods and reached shipment points in
Iran, Libya and North Korea. If a backwater nation like North Korea can
acquire nuclear weapons and develop missiles that may soon reach the
U.S., then mass murder has gone mass market.

In short, all you need is money; the expertise and material can be
bought. There is wide discussion in the nuclear proliferation
literature of the incentives for Saudi Arabia to achieve nuclear
capability as a hedge against Iran. The Saudi government denies any
such intention, as do all nonnuclear nations suspected of trying.

We have a choice: Do we prefer this ability in the hands of democracies
or dictatorships? Will the world's civilian populations be safer if
nuclear capability is held by mullahfied Iran, Kim-crazy North Korea
and Taiwan-obsessed China, or by democratic Brazil (suspected of
seeking nukes), Ukraine (inheritor of 5,000 nuclear warheads) or Iraq?
(To believe that an untouched Saddam five years hence wouldn't have
been back in the WMD game is fatuous beyond description.)

This week, in a not-much-noticed follow-on report from the 9/11
Commission, one finds this statement: "Preventing terrorists from
gaining access to weapons of mass destruction must be elevated above
all other problems of national security because it represents the
greatest threat to the American people."

By "terrorists" the commission means al Qaeda. By "weapons of mass
destruction" it means nuclear devices -- specifically the leakage of
nuclear bomb-making material from former Soviet sites. The original
9/11 Commission's report said al Qaeda had tried to get nuclear WMD for
10 years, presumably while bleeding Afghanistan. Al Qaeda now is in
Iraq. It is trying to push the U.S. out of Iraq. Some in Washington
want a withdrawal from Iraq. If we do that before Iraq is secure,
leaving its central provinces and neighboring nations as a jihadist
transit point, will the commission's reasonable fears about WMD
acquisition by terrorists ease? Duh.

Democratizing Iraq is where the hedge has been placed against Islamic
extremism's proven compulsion to annihilate civilian populations --
with airliners, humans as bombs and assuredly any WMD they can get --
each weapon as morally repugnant as the next. Yes, Iraqi
democratization may not work. But it is a bet worth making. As former
U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle wrote on this page not long
ago, "The paroxysm after 9/11 would be a hiccup compared with the
reaction the morning after one or more nuclear bombs caused massive
devastation."

Against this, the current opposition spectacle in Washington is not
edifying. How did it come to pass that an opposition's measure of a
president's foreign policy was all or nothing, success or "failure"?
The answer is that the political absolutism now normal in Washington
arrived at the moment -- Nov. 7, 2000 -- that our politics subordinated
even a war against terror to seizing the office of the presidency.

The winning of the Cold War was bipartisan. The winning of the war on
terror is open to question, every hour