Letter From Ground Zero

A small journalistic cottage industry has grown up demonstrating that the Bush Administration took the nation to war against Iraq under false pretenses. The industry has been highly productive. Administration officials claimed certain knowledge that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when they had no such knowledge. They claimed that the Iraqi government was seeking uranium ore from Niger months after the CIA had already disproven the charge. They claimed that Iraq had ties with Al Qaeda in the absence of any evidence of such ties, and much evidence to the contrary. When the intelligence agencies produced conclusions the Administration didn't like, it pressured them to come up with different conclusions. And so forth.

A parallel but less noticed collapse of Administration policy has been occurring with regard to another region. As early as the State of the Union address, George W. Bush announced a radical change in US policies for dealing with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The United States, the President said, would "prevent" the spread of the weapons by the pre-emptive use of military force. "We will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." The words "will not permit" are the words of an ultimatum. They place the military prestige of the country making them on the line as clearly as language can. The threat was of course carried out in Iraq--with the nugatory results just mentioned.

In another country, North Korea, however, the nuclear programs were real. They were not only real; they led (according to both the North Korean and the US governments) to the actual production of nuclear weapons. Yet the United States did nothing. Administration spokesmen repeatedly declared that North Korea's acquisition of nuclear arms was "not a crisis." How, observers demanded to know at the time, could it be a crisis for Iraq to have a nuclear weapons program (which then was still thought to exist) but not a crisis for North Korea to have an actual nuclear arsenal?

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