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"We were not lying," a Bush administration
official told ABC News. "But it was just a matter
of emphasis." The official was referring to the
way the administration hyped the threat that
Saddam Hussein posed to the United States.
According to the ABC report, the real reason for
the war was that the administration "wanted to
make a statement." And why Iraq? "Officials
acknowledge that Saddam had all the requirements
to make him, from their standpoint, the perfect
target."

A British newspaper, The Independent, reports that
"intelligence agencies on both sides of the
Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave
political leaders were distorted in the rush to
war." One "high-level source" told the paper that
"they ignored intelligence assessments which said
Iraq was not a threat."

Sure enough, we have yet to find any weapons of
mass destruction. It´s hard to believe that we
won´t eventually find some poison gas or crude
biological weapons. But those aren´t true
W.M.D.´s, the sort of weapons that can make a
small, poor country a threat to the greatest power
the world has ever known. Remember that President
Bush made his case for war by warning of a
"mushroom cloud." Clearly, Iraq didn´t have
anything like that — and Mr. Bush must have
known that it didn´t.
Does it matter that we were misled into war? Some
people say that it doesn´t: we won, and the Iraqi
people have been freed. But we ought to ask some
hard questions — not just about Iraq, but
about ourselves.

First, why is our compassion so selective? In 2001
the World Health Organization — the same
organization we now count on to protect us from
SARS — called for a program to fight
infectious diseases in poor countries, arguing
that it would save the lives of millions of people
every year. The U.S. share of the expenses would
have been about $10 billion per year — a
small fraction of what we will spend on war and
occupation. Yet the Bush administration
contemptuously dismissed the proposal.

Or consider one of America´s first major postwar
acts of diplomacy: blocking a plan to send U.N.
peacekeepers to Ivory Coast (a former French
colony) to enforce a truce in a vicious civil war.
The U.S. complains that it will cost too much. And
that must be true — we wouldn´t let innocent
people die just to spite the French, would we?

So it seems that our deep concern for the Iraqi
people doesn´t extend to suffering people
elsewhere. I guess it´s just a matter of emphasis.
A cynic might point out, however, that saving
lives peacefully doesn´t offer any occasion to
stage a victory parade.

Meanwhile, aren´t the leaders of a democratic
nation supposed to tell their citizens the truth?

One wonders whether most of the public will ever
learn that the original case for war has turned
out to be false. In fact, my guess is that most
Americans believe that we have found W.M.D.´s.
Each potential find gets blaring coverage on TV;
how many people catch the later announcement
— if it is ever announced — that it
was a false alarm? It´s a pattern of
misinformation that recapitulates the way the war
was sold in the first place. Each administration
charge against Iraq received prominent coverage;
the subsequent debunking did not.

Did the news media feel that it was unpatriotic to
question the administration´s credibility? Some
strange things certainly happened. For example, in
September Mr. Bush cited an International Atomic
Energy Agency report that he said showed that
Saddam was only months from having nuclear
weapons. "I don´t know what more evidence we
need," he said. In fact, the report said no such
thing — and for a few hours the lead story
on MSNBC´s Web site bore the headline "White
House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq." Then the
story vanished — not just from the top of
the page, but from the site.

Thanks to this pattern of loud assertions and
muted or suppressed retractions, the American
public probably believes that we went to war to
avert an immediate threat — just as it
believes that Saddam had something to do with
Sept. 11.
Now it´s true that the war removed an evil tyrant.
But a democracy´s decisions, right or wrong, are
supposed to take place with the informed consent
of its citizens. That didn´t happen this time. And
we are a democracy — aren´t we?


April 29, 2003
By PAUL KRUGMAN