It takes a certain amount of ego to do this job.
I don’t mean an unhealthy obsession with the wonderfulness of
oneself. Rather, I mean that inflicting one’s opinions on others for a
living requires immense confidence in one’s own judgment. This is
not a job for people who don’t like saying, “'I told you so.”
Your humble correspondent was typical in this regard until a year
ago today. That’s when the war against Iraq began. As bombs
began raining on Baghdad, I worried-and argued in this space-that
we were making a
dreadful mistake.
It was one of the
very few times in my
professional life that I
wanted to be wrong.
Indeed, I tried to con
vince myself that I
was. After all, the
decision to go to war
was based on reports
from intelligence
experts, which I
assuredly am not. So
I sought comfort in
the fact that “people who know about these things” felt it necessary
to attack a nation that had not attacked us or our allies.
I was like a number of other people whose paths I crossed that
winter-retirees, students, working people. All of us dubious about
the war, but hoping we were wrong. The price of being right was
too high: lives lost, bodies maimed and American credibility crip
pled, for nothing.
A year later, much that wasn’t clear has since become crystal.
Starting, obviously, with the weapons of mass destruction we were
told Iraq possessed and would use against us unless we moved
first. "We were all wrong,” former U.S. weapons inspector David
Kay told a congressional committee in January.
If the fact that the weapons apparently do not exist were the only
thing that had become clear here, it might be possible to swallow
hard and move on. Unfortunately, something worse has also
become obvious. Namely, that the weapons don’t matter and never
really did.
You can infer this if you like from the stubbornness with which
the architects of this war-national security adviser Condoleezza
Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin
Powell-have defended it. Unabashed and unapologetic, Team Bush
has assured us in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary that
the invasion was a good thing.
But it’s more than inference. The president himself has as much
as said the weapons never really mattered. He told an audience in
By LEONARD PITTS Jr.
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
I hate to say I told
you so, but ...
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a nationally distributed KRT columnist whose poignant perceptions about
racial and political issues appear in newspapers all over the country. He is a columnist for the
Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla. 33132. Readers may write to him via e-mail at
lpitts@herald.com, or by calling toll-free at 1-888-251-4407.
Charleston, S.C., last month that even knowing what he knows
today, i.e., that weapons of mass destruction probably don’t exist,
he would “still” have invaded Iraq.
“'America did the right thing in Iraq,” he said.
It was arguably the starkest indication to date that the nation’s
show of diplomacy in the days prior to the invasion was always a
sham, a fig leaf to cover the fact that George W. Bush was deter
mined from the beginning to go to war. Diplomacy would not get
in his way, nor would facts, nor would the hesitation of allies.
And what has it gotten us? Everything we feared. Lives lost.
Bodies maimed. American prestige crippled. And daily attacks of
ever-increasing intensity on soldiers who we were told
would be greeted with open arms as liberators.
All for nothing.
Yes, it is said by Bush men and women that we fought
to strike against terrorism- except that Iraq had no docu
mented role in the Sept. 11 attacks. It is said that we
fought from a moral
objection to tyranny,
except that we don’t
seem all that trou
bled by tyrants in
nations that lack
huge oil reserves.
Everything is said
except the truth: that
we rushed into an unnecessary
war on a half-baked mission.
And that the repercussions of
our hubris will shadow us for
years.
It takes me back to those
earnest conversations of a year
ago, all of us watching war
coming like black clouds gath
ering on the horizon and feel
ing, the way you feel a storm in
your bones, that this was a mis
take. We all wanted so badly to
be wrong.
We were not
(c) 2004, The Miami Herald
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