Desperate to prove the notion that the administration did too call the threat from Saddam “imminent,” Josh Marshall, becoming ever more stridently anti-Bush, came up with a contest. He asked his readers to send in the best administration “imminent threat” quote. Well, you can judge for yourself. But, to my mind, he comes up completely empty. No administration official used that term. None. The best Marshall can come up with are reporters’ off-the-cuff formulations in questions to Ari Fleischer which evinced the response “yes.” He links to Rumsfeld testimony in which the secretary of defense specifically spells out the core of the administration’s case:
So we are on notice: An attack very likely will be attempted. The only question is when, and by what technique. It could be months; it could be a year; it could be years. But it will happen, and each of us need to pause and think about that. If the worst were to happen, not one of us here today would be able to honestly say that it was a surprise, because it will not be a surprise.
So we have no administration reference to an “imminent threat” and a chief spokesman saying that the threat could be as much as years away and, at the least, months. We have the president himself saying explicitly that “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.”
THE DEEPER ISSUE: We can fight over words in this way, but the fundamental reality also undermines Marshall’s case. The point about 9/11 is that it showed that we were in a new world where we could be attacked by shadowy groups with little warning. The point about Saddam is that he was a sworn enemy of the U.S., had been known to develop an arsenal of WMDs, was in a position to arm terrorists in a devastating way, and any president had to weigh the risk of him staying in power in that new climate. The actual threat hangs over us all the time. It is unlike previous threats from foreign powers. It is accountable to no rules and no ethics. We know it will give us no formal warning. But we cannot know it is “imminent”. If we had such proof – that the U.S. was under an imminent threat of attack – there would have been no debate at all. Of course a country has the right to defend itself when it is faced with an imminent threat. The debate is over how seriously to take the threat we now face. The strongest argument of the anti-war crowd is that we now know that the WMD threat from Saddam was much less than almost everyone (including most of them) believed. They’re right – at least from the evidence so far. But that doesn’t resolve the question of what we should have done before the war, when we had limited knowledge and information. Josh implies we should have risked it, and kept Saddam in power, with fingers crossed. But then Josh wasn’t president. He wasn’t responsible for guessing wrong. The question we have to answer is a relatively simple one: do we want a president who will veer on the optimistic side when it comes to Islamist terror, or do we want a president that will veer on the side of caution and aggression? Do we want one who will hope for the best or one who will act, assuming the worst? I thought 9/11 ended that debate. It clearly hasn’t. But it’s the central debate of the coming election.
The Dish 