O. Ricardo Pimentel

PHOENIX -- The Iraqi war was intended to teach a lot of folks, among them Iranians, a lesson.
Arguably, here's what Iran, now in U.S. crosshairs for doing all those things we said Iraq was doing, might have learned.

-If, after you are accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, you submit to international inspection, get ready to be invaded anyway.

-If you say you don't have any such weapons, you are, of course, lying. If inspectors can't find any, you're hiding them. And if, after invasion, they still can't be found, you were just awfully good at both of the above.

-If one of the charges is, specifically, that you're developing nuclear weapons, best you speed things along.

You see, as Iraq demonstrated, countries that we say are oh-so-close to having nukes get invaded.

On the other hand, we use diplomacy and stinging rebukes for countries such as North Korea. You know, countries that are apparently far along in nuke development, hint that they might actually have the little nasties and have the means to deliver them.

If you have nukes, are an authoritarian government, and help us with terrorists, you become an ally. Just ask Pakistan.

And if you're an authoritarian government in a country with no religious freedom, supply the world with terrorists and have an abundance of oil, you're also a bosom buddy. Just like Saudi Arabia.

The most effective lesson of the Iraqi war, however, is not really for the Iranians, Syrians, Libyans or North Koreans.

It's for the Bush administration. It learned that it can stretch the facts, fabricate out of whole cloth, spin nuggets into "truth" and frighten Americans at will. And it's all OK as long as "liberated" folks are jubilant at some point on the evening news.

And therein lies a cautionary note for Americans in general. If virtually none of what this administration said about Iraq -- from nuclear weapons to imminent threat -- has been borne out, why should we believe what is now being said about Iran?

We are, after all, getting much of our information from Iranian opposition groups, just as we got a lot of our information from all those reliable Iraqi opposition groups.

But the biggest conundrum about the war aftermath and the countdown to the next confrontation is that no one here really seems to give a hoot.

The Bush administration force-fed us whatever information was useful to make a case for what it wanted to do, disregarding any and all countervailing and inconvenient intelligence.

Whether this was mere reckless disregard for the truth or outright fabrication, it amounts to the same thing.

And it matters little if we eventually find WMDs. It's clear that we lied about the certainty that they existed, that they posed any imminent threat at all and that war was necessary to protect us all from them.

In other words, WMD hype was just a matter of convenience.

We've just recently had terrorist bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaida allegedly masterminded them. Osama bin Laden is still slinking about. And we have a bad case of "orange alert" jitters in this country.

The question: Do you feel any safer because "imminent-threat" Iraq has been conquered (with Saddam Hussein still unaccounted for)?

If you do, current events might not be your strong suit. If we're going to consider war again, how about we wait for all the facts -- real ones -- before the shooting starts?

O. Ricardo Pimentel, a columnist for Gannett News Service, appears on this page periodically.
 
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