Here we are, almost two months past the lightning-fast finish of the war in Iraq, and I have yet to hear many in the media or even in the business of partisan politics — aside from Sen. Robert Byrd — bluntly ask the hardest question:
Before the war, did the president and his top lieutenants lie? Did they lie to get Americans to rally around them?
Remember (although the president might prefer it if you don't), before the war, he didn't equivocate: "In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world."
From Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the same line. The secretary of state left no doubt at the United Nations: Saddam had tens of thousands of liters of anthrax, of botulism, and hundreds of tons of nerve gas.
Maybe he did. Maybe, as the administration has been suggesting, we haven't found anything because Saddam at the last minute destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, or sent them to Syria before we attacked.
But is that logical, if they were his best bet against us? Or maybe, as they now suggest, it'll take months of searching and thousands of searchers to find what we went to war for. (Actually, senior officials now are substituting "years" for "months," which ought to cover their you-know-whats through Election Day 2004, if nothing turns up by then.)
True, Saddam had tons of time to hide everything. But if uncovering his weapons really was our primary goal, then why didn't we even have search teams assembled and their equipment ready for the first opportunity to explore? If we were so certain of Saddam's nuclear program, why did we wait so long before securing the most highly suspect sites, which allowed Iraqi looters to get to them first? And why haven't the fallen Iraqi leaders from the famous deck of cards flipped — at least one of them, anyway — and led us to the loot? If survival is their instinct, intransigence seems an unlikely strategy.
Oh, sure. We got a free Iraq — well, maybe. Remember, to cover the chaos in the wake of the war, Rumsfeld told us that freedom is "untidy." I wonder, if it were his Pentagon office being looted, whether he'd have dismissed it as "untidy."
But if, for the sake of argument, true democracy blossoms in Baghdad and the lives of 25 million people genuinely get better, there's another question to ask: Did Americans sign on just to free those unlucky Iraqis from Saddam's shackles?
Sure, that outcome alone gives profound and humane fulfillment, but as Peggy Lee used to croon, "Is that all there is?" For tens of billions of dollars, and about 150 American lives (and don't forget the children and spouses our soldiers left behind). And how many innocent Iraqi lives?
No one even knows, and the United States has said it won't bother to find out. The Los Angeles Times tried, surveying Iraqi hospitals. Its conclusion: at least 1,700 civilians died, probably another 8,000 were injured, some mangled and disfigured for life — and don't forget how many probably never got to a hospital to even be reported.
As always, we must weigh cost against benefit. A free Iraq. A warning to other tyrants that the United States means business. Mind you, we've just seen coordinated terrorism in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Israel, so one might ask whether our victory in Iraq did much to stamp it out. But that's another question for another day.
The question today is: When the president and his deputies told us we must fight a "preventive" war to kill Saddam before he kills us, did they sell us a bill of goods?
Asking is still legal, by the way. Some Americans will call you an "America hater." Tell them to stuff it! If you didn't love America, you wouldn't care whether leaders lie. And if we find those dreadful weapons, the egg on our faces will taste just fine.
Greg Dobbs was an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ABC News, and now hosts a radio talk show in Denver. E-mail is: dobbsnews@yahoo.com