❄ PAUL KRUGMAN ON CAUSES
Take a look at Paul Krugmans 29 April 2003 column in The New York Times, in which he offers these views on motive for the Iraq war, and then suggests that in a democracy officials have a duty to tell the truth:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Matters of Emphasis
By PAUL KRUGMAN
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 arent 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.
[Bruce’s Blog: 2003.05.24. Post: Bxx Short Link: http://www.learnworld.com/BRUCE/?p=60. Front Door Index: http://blog.learnworld.com/. Permalink: http://www.learnworld.com/BRUCE/uncategorized/paul-krugman-on-causes/]