More inside the Beltway spinning at work: Libya’s coming clean on WMD is solely the product of Bush’s war in Iraq. That’s what the Bush Administration wants us to believe. And the Beltway paper of record seems awfully accepting of the Administration’s spin. In Sunday’s Post, Dana Milbank writes, “It has been a week of sweet vindication for those who promulgated what they call the Bush Doctrine.”
Richard Perle scurried to tell Milbank, “It’s always been at the heart of the Bush doctrine that a more robust policy would permit us to elicit greater cooperation from adversaries than we’d had in the past when we acquiesced. With the capture of Saddam, the sense that momentum may be with us is very important.”
In the Beltway narrative, there’s no room for how Libya’s decision to permit UN weapons inspectors in confirms that the US can achieve its strategic international goals using tools other than military force–for example, diplomatic, political and economic pressure. Nor is there room for all the work and time numerous European nations have invested in engaging Libya over the last five years. Or of the hard work of the UN Security Council in negotiating a settlement of the Lockerbie case, a resolution which may have had more to do with Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s desire to reenter the international mainstream than any other single factor.
Nor is there any discussion of why the Administration supports the role of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors in disarming Libya whereas it was so dismissive of the IAEA’s work in Iraq. And, how many understand that–as Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Adminstration National Security Council staff member reveals–“Within months after September 11th, we had the Libyans, the Syrians and the Iranians all coming to us saying what can we do [to better relations]? We didn’t really engage any of them because we decided to do Iraq. We really squandered two years of capital that will make it harder to apply this model to the hard cases like Iran and Syria.”
Libya’s agreement to disarm under the watch of international inspectors is a welcome development but it is not as dramatic a turnaround as Bush & Co want us to believe. According to Joseph Cirincone, an arms specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “It’s part of a trend that has been underway for ten years–of reforms and trying to reintegrate with Europe, mainly for business reasons.”
Let’s not allow the Administration to neocon us into believing that Libya’s decision is the sole result of Bush’s war in Iraq. Instead, let’s use Libya’s example to call for inspections and reductions of WMD in all countries around the world, including here in the US.
