By Frank Rich, NY Times

Candor is so little prized in Washington that you want to shake the hand of anyone who dares commit it. So cheers to Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, for telling The Times's Elisabeth Bumiller the real reason that his boss withheld his full-frontal move on Saddam Hussein until September: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Mr. Card has taken some heat for talking about a war in which many may die as if it were the rollout of a new S.U.V. But he wasn't lying, and history has already proved him right. This campaign has been so well timed and executed that the new product already owns the market. The unofficial motto of the 9/11 anniversary may have been "Never forget," but by 9/12, if not before, the war on Al Qaeda was already fading from memory as the world was invited to test-drive the war on Iraq.

Al Qaeda may be forgotten, but it's not gone — apparently even from the suburbs of Buffalo, as CBS News first reported last night. At least two-thirds of its top leadership remains at large. A draft version of a U.N. report on our failure to shut down its cash flow says that "Al Qaeda is by all accounts `fit and well' and poised to strike again at its leisure." (It has already struck at least a half-dozen times since January.) Regime change, anyone? Al Qaeda almost brought one about in Afghanistan, assuming its likely role in the assassination attempt on Hamid Karzai. As Harry Shearer said in his satirical radio program, "Le Show," 9/11 is "the event that changed everything except terrorism."

But on to Iraq. Saddam might "be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year," said George W. Bush to the U.N. on Thursday. Yes, but Pakistan, where The Washington Post recently found two top Qaeda operatives planning new missions with impunity, already has nuclear weapons within terrorists' reach. "Al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq," said Mr. Bush on Thursday. Yes, but there are Qaeda operatives in at least 65 countries, and The Times reported this week that the largest number of them are in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran (identified by Mr. Bush's own State Department in May as "the most active state sponsor of terrorism"), Syria and Yemen are not far behind. And then there's our ally, Saudi Arabia: according to USA Today, nearly 80 percent of the hits on a secretive Qaeda Web site since June have come from addresses in the country that also spawned nearly 80 percent of the 9/11 hijackers.

That Iraq is "a grave and gathering danger," as the president also said, is not in doubt. But is it as grave a danger as the enemy that attacked America on 9/11 and those states that are its most integral collaborators? The campaign against Iraq, wrote Brent Scowcroft in the op-ed that launched a thousand others, "is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism." Since major Qaeda attacks are planned well in advance and have historically been separated by intervals of 12 to 24 months, we will find out how much we've been distracted soon enough.

There is now a "debate" about the new war, but so far it has been largely a parochial Washington affair, largely about process, and soon to be academic. Will President Bush ask Congress for authorization to go after Saddam? Will he consult the Security Council? We now know the answers are yes and yes, and that Congress will not stand in his way. (If the Democrats can't challenge the president about taxes, they certainly won't about war.) The Security Council may now sign on too, to Mr. Bush's rightful demand that the U.N. enforce its own resolutions against Iraq.

But when Saddam in all likelihood balks, we'll go to war, no matter how few our allies. If you think back to that ancient past of summer 2001, you'll recognize the game plan from the White House's several weeks of deliberation over stem-cell research. "He's listening to all sides of the debate," Ari Fleischer said then, even though it was evident from the get-go that Mr. Bush would do pretty much what he always intended after a few weeks of ostentatious "listening."

To question the president on Iraq is an invitation to have one's patriotism besmirched. The invective aimed at those with the toughest questions, almost all of them pillars of the Republican or military establishments, has been borderline ugly, complete with the requisite allusions to Neville Chamberlain. But it's hard to find any doubter of the war who wants to appease Saddam or denies that he is an evil player. The question many critics are asking is why he has jumped to the head of the most-wanted list when the war on Al Qaeda remains unfinished and our resources are finite. Even those who can stomach pre-emptive war as a new doctrine wonder if we have our pre-emptive priorities straight.

Peggy Noonan, as faithful a George W. Bush partisan as there is, sharpened the question most pointedly on The Wall Street Journal editorial page on Wednesday, when she implored the president to give us facts instead of sermons in making his case. " `Saddam is evil' is not enough," she wrote. "A number of people are evil, and some are even our friends. `Saddam has weapons of mass destruction' is not enough. A number of countries do. What the people need now is hard data that demonstrate conclusively that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which he is readying to use on the people of the U.S. or the people of the West." (And maybe even the non-West.)

What we have been getting instead is the one thing worse than no data — false data. For months, administration officials have been trying to implicate Iraq in 9/11 with the story of an alleged April 2001 meeting in Prague between Mohamed Atta and a Saddam spy. But the C.I.A. can find no evidence of this, and the 21-page fact sheet the U.S. released with the president's speech mentions no Saddam-9/11 link at all. As for nuclear arms, last weekend in his appearance with Tony Blair the president referred to a 1998 International Atomic Energy Agency report that said Iraq was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon, adding "I don't know what more evidence we need." Plenty more, as it happens, because an agency spokesman says no such report exists. This is why those who most want to believe Mr. Bush, from a conservative G.O.P. Senate leader like Don Nickles to our allies, keep saying (in Mr. Nickles's words), "You're not giving us enough."

It's this high-handedness that echoes the run-up to Vietnam. The analogy can be overdone, certainly, since today's armed forces are highly unlikely to find Iraq a military quagmire and no one can even try to make a case for the legitimacy of Saddam's regime. But there is a widening credibility gap between the White House's marketing of the war and the known facts. The arrogance of this C.E.O. administration, which gives citizens no better information than companies like Halliburton gave to its stockholders, recalls the hubris of those Ivy League and corporate "whiz kids" on Robert McNamara's Pentagon team who saw themselves as better and brighter than the rest of us.

But on to Iraq. Anyone who believes that Mr. Bush might turn back now has not been following the path of a president who, by his own account, never second-guesses a decision; indeed, we're already ratcheting up our longstanding military engagement with Saddam. As we move from containment to attack mode, though, it might be best to focus less on procedural debates, such as the timing and wording of whatever rubber-stamp approval Congress will deliver, and more on the tougher questions the administration would prefer to ignore.

What happens if Al Qaeda attacks the U.S., or if Afghanistan or Pakistan falls while we're at war in Iraq? Can we continue to meet all our commitments with an all-volunteer army? As budget deficits spiral into the foreseeable future, where will we get the tens of billions of dollars we need to support the post-Saddam Iraq that we will surely inherit? Is Saddam our new focus because he's the most catastrophic threat or is there another agenda that should be spelled out, whether it involves oil or unfinished Bush family business?

This is the candid talk we need to have. Maybe the administration can make the case that we can simultaneously whip Al Qaeda and Saddam, secure Afghanistan for keeps, tame the rest of the "axis of evil," guzzle gas in perpetuity and keep cutting taxes (for some of us). If that's so, and someone else's children will be marching on Baghdad, what patriot would not stand up and say "Let's roll"?

Reproduced from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/opinion/14RICH.html

Return of the DICKS!
By Heather Wokusch, www.heatherwokusch.com

It's that time again...

Last spring's DICK awards, in honor of US "Vice President" Dick Cheney (under investigation for accounting fraud in his role as CEO of Halliburton), honored outstanding achievements in the art of duping the masses and using public resources for personal gain.

But now that Zany Cheney is fightin' mad and ready to spill some blood (not his own, of course) by attacking Iraq - and eventually maybe the other 60 countries he has labeled as part of the "terrorist underworld" - a new breed of DICK is emerging: the Warmonger, eager to initiate global brawls and "take the battle to the enemy."

Yes, this is the same Dick Cheney who deferred the draft multiple times because he "had other priorities than military service," and as Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War registered cold surprise that the US casualties were so low. The Dick Cheney who recently addressed veterans' groups, and (oddly resembling Mr. Staypuff's scary twin) warned them of Saddam Hussein's pattern of skirting UN resolutions and sanctions, yet failed to mention that back in his own CEO days, Cheney's Halliburton had allowed its foreign subsidiaries and affiliates to skirt US sanctions on Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Hussein's government. Cheney repeatedly cited Hussein's possession of chemical weapons as justification for a US attack, but forgot to mention his own fight against an international convention on chemical weapons, or the fact that both the Reagan and Bush Sr. text administrations had sold chemical weapons to Iraq (right up until 1992 - even after it was revealed Hussein had gassed the Kurds at Halabja).

But details like history get lost with the smell of blood - or oil. So now that our Warmonger "leaders" insist it's time for battle, without further ado, (drum roll please ...) let's bring on the DICKS!

The nominations for Best Supporting Foreign Warmonger DICK were crowded with worthy hopefuls. Would the prize go to Australian Prime Minister John Howard for his "firm and faithful" commitment to Bush's global war on terrorism, or for the distinction of being the first foreign leader to hail Bush's pre-emptive military strike policy? Or would the award go to our man in Afghanistan, US-approved Hamid Karzai, whose response to escalating tribal violence and a recent assassination attempt consisted of a quick trip to the US?

Truly deserving candidates indeed, but one DICK rose above the rest, grandly outperforming all expectations. A big hand for that special friend, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair! Whether hangin' out at the Texas ranch, breaking bread at the presidential retreat in Maryland, or politely clarifying what Bush is fumbling at joint press conferences, Blair has proven a loyal comrade all the way. Promising that Britain would be alongside America "when the shooting starts" and providing aircraft to accompany US military planes on their recent bombing raids of Iraq, Blair justified his military support by citing text a "new" International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report as proof Hussein was developing nuclear weapons; this report came as news to the IAEA, which issued a quick press release in response, stating that they actually had not released any "new" report, and furthermore stood by their previous reports stating the Iraqi program had been successfully dismantled by the end of 1998.

Blair somehow forgot to mention that, like their American counterparts, the British government had actually stepped up text its weapons-related sales to the Hussein government after the 1988 Halabja attack. (Former Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, explained the sales were kept secret to defend British corporate interests from "malicious commentators" and "emotional misunderstandings.") Bottom line: DICKs don't worry about such niceties as complicity or half-truths: war is good, corporate profit is good, and if you disagree you're the enemy.

Each nominee for Best Back-scratching Foreign Warmonger DICK exemplified the motto "If Bush can call people he doesn't like terrorists, then so can I." There was Russian President Vladimir Putin stirring up trouble in Chechnya, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rolling tanks into Palestinian territory, and Indian-Pakistani leaders rattling Kashmiri sabers, threatening the nuclear decimation of millions. In a class by himself, though, was Pakistan's General Pervez Musharaf, who recently re-elected himself both president and army chief, cryptically explaining "If you want to keep the army out, you have to bring it in." Far too many deserving DICKs in this category folks, so no clear winners - looks like we all lose.

But now it's time for the grand prize, the coveted DICK of the Year award ... (drum roll please) ... two thumbs up for, you guessed it, "President" Bush! Like Cheney, Bush seemed to have had other priorities than military service, barely showing up for a mysteriously shortened stint in the Texas Air National Guard, but that doesn't stop him from bragging "I've been to war." He delicately observed Hussein "has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he had made not to harbor, not to develop weapons of mass destruction ... I'm going to call upon the world to recognize that he is stiffing the world," but has yet to convince the world that Hussein is the one stiffing them. He fulminates about Hussein's "nuke-u-lar" weapon capacity in spite of the fact that available evidence points against it and former weapons inspectors call the Bush claims direct lies. He tells the United Nations he wants it to be "effective and respectful" then thumbs his nose saying if the UN doesn't give him the green light to attack Iraq, he will do it anyway. What a DICK!

Interesting that many arguing against an attack are those who experienced it the first time. A 10-point list by Gulf War veterans eloquently opposes a second Gulf War, citing factors such as increased troop vulnerability and decreased international support.

As with the last DICK awards, the overriding question remains - who really is the biggest DICK? The "leader" getting away with duping the public into war, or the public allowing the leader to get away with it?

Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer. She can be contacted via her site at www.heatherwokusch.com