Oh, Never Mind
Back in the early, funny days of Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner played a character named “Emily Litella,” an earnest, slightly deaf old woman who offered cranky commentaries on the “Weekend Update” news segment. She would begin by outlining her outrage over some atrocious thing she’d (mis)heard: “human rice in China,” for example. She’d go on and on about how awful it was that they were using people as food (“just because there’s so many of them doesn’t mean they have to resort to cannibalism!”), getting worked into a frothy lather over the barbarity, the injustice, the…
At some point, Chevy Chase, the unflappable anchor, would step in with a look of a veterinarian about to euthanize a sick puppy. “That’s human rights, Emily, not human rice.” And Emily, without missing a beat, would fold her papers, look up into the camera, smile sweetly, and repeat her catch phrase: “Oh. Never mind.”
President Bush and those who cooked up the Iraq war faced an Emily Litella moment yesterday when inspectors quietly called off the hunt for WMDs, months and years after it was dead obvious to everyone that there were none to be found.
Back in the 70s, people would laugh at the absurdity of getting worked up over a ridiculous misunderstanding, and would probably recoil in horror at the idea that we’d go to war over one. Today, 51% of the country will go to the wall defending a blunder (or deception, depending on your perspective) of historical proportions as the act of a patriot, a “strong leader” looking out for our interests. There’s progress for you.
Jon Stewart did a riff on this a few months ago, suggesting that Bush possibly mistook Iran, which has WMDs and is looking to add nukes any day now, with Iraq. “N, Q – only two letters apart. An honest mistake, right?”
What can you say about this? There may have been reasons to attack Iraq – defensible in terms of realpolitik if not self-defense or grand humanitarian goals, but Bush was too lazy and distrustful to make that case. Perhaps he suspected it would not convince Americans or the international community that the costs of a war and occupation would be worthwhile. And since he, and/or his advisors, felt in their gut that attacking Saddam was the right thing to do, they chose to hang the war on the flimsiest possible pretext, knowing that the doctrine of “imminent threat” was sufficiently incendiary to steamroll opposition.
The danger was that they’d be wrong. Sure, intelligence estimates claimed there were WMDs, but we now know how flawed that system was. More to the point, the international inspection teams that were on the ground in Iraq right up to the week of the invasion could find no evidence of their existence. What Bush took as evidence of deception turned out actually to be the truth.
If Bush had lost a gamble like this on some lower-stakes issue, the whole country would have laughed and pointed at his foolishness, baseless arrogance, and dirt-poor judgment. But since he used the lives of American servicemen as his ante in the game, his staggering misleadership on Iraq becomes inextricably tied to matters so awful and tragic that it was nearly impossible for many well-meaning people to untangle them at the polls.
The Administration backed off the WMD point months ago, of course. Now it’s all about “democracy” and “nation building” (we’ll see how long it takes after the elections before that rationale is no longer operative). Some have suggested that it was about putting the fear into other governments, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in particular. Yep, I’ll bet they’re shaking in their boots seeing America reduced to a pitiful helpless giant under the leadership of President Litella.
So all that’s left is for Bush to fold his papers, smile at the camera, and say, “Oh, never mind.” Then we can all laugh (after we bury the dead, of course) and go back to sleep. But really, where’s Chevy Chase when you need him?
10:55:50 AM 
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