The post-war debate on the pre-war rhetoric, part IV

Schwarz responds to Sebastian Holsclaw’s first post. [Both Holsclaw and Schwarz will respond to each other’s rebuttals, and then I’ll render my judgment]: Sebastian’s claim that the Bush administration “strenuously resisted labeling” Iraq an imminent threat is misleading. The Bush administration rarely addressed the question using this specific language. On some occasions, they skirted around the issue, neither saying Iraq was an imminent threat, nor that it wasn’t, nor that it might be but we couldn’t know for sure:

QUESTION: Richard, just to pursue this line a bit further. Is the threat from North Korea more or less imminent than the threat from Iraq? MR. BOUCHER: There is not one policy that fits all. Each situation has to be dealt with on its own. We want to deal with this situation peacefully with regard to North Korea and we will make the appropriate decisions.

On some of these occasions when they were directly asked using this specific language, as I noted, Ari Fleischer happily assented that the administration claimed Iraq was an imminent threat. On another occasion, the State of the Union address, the administration (as I also noted) did not, as Sebastian claims, “specifically reject a need for an imminent threat before attacking Saddam’s regime.” Bush did not say “Iraq doesn’t need to be an imminent threat for us to attack it.” Rather, he rejected the idea that we could accurately perceive whether the threat was imminent. Therefore, a more accurate description of what happened is this: During the runup to the war, many people questioned whether Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. However, except on a few occasions, the Bush administration avoided engaging the issue using this exact language. Instead, they made many extremely alarming claims that used synonymous language and terms. When the exact “imminent threat” language was used, the administration sometimes agreed that Iraq was an imminent threat; sometimes didn’t address the question; and sometimes said we couldn’t know whether or not it was an imminent threat. It is speculation, but (I believe) quite plausible, that the Bush administration was trying to have it both ways. It was difficult for them to claim that Iraq in fact was an imminent threat to the U.S., and they certainly did not want to have to assert explicitly that it was an imminent threat in order to wage war. But they also couldn’t say straightforwardly that Iraq was not an imminent threat, because it would undercut support for a war. Hence a frequent avoidance of the exact language, combined with repeated references to the “clear peril” and “gathering danger” that was “more clearly defined” than Al-Qaida and could strike on “any given day.”