THE NATION ON THE IRAQ WAR

First, a statement that really ought to go without saying, but seeing as how much of the US population doesn't seem to get it, I guess it just has to be said:

The Moral Case Against the Iraq War

"Each age and place has its own style of evil," Time essayist Lance Morrow observes in his book "Evil: An Investigation." The history of radical evil up to now has been primarily a story of world-class criminals, each with his own method of mass killing, internment, expulsion and terror. What is unique about the kind of evil the Bush Administration has brought into the world is that a global law-enforcement campaign to bring a world-class criminal to justice has itself become a vast criminal enterprise. It is one of the bedrock principles of the rule of law that a law-enforcement officer cannot break the law as a means of enforcing the law. "For my part, I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part," Holmes wrote in a famous dissent that announced a constitutional principle of "lesser evils" that would eventually become prevailing law. The principle was most eloquently articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis: "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."

The capture of Saddam Hussein, who may have killed as many as 300,000 people, ends a twenty-four-year reign of terror and might finally bring a measure of justice to the Iraqi people. But what would we think of a police chief whose war against crime resulted in killing thousands of innocent bystanders in the course of apprehending a criminal suspect, even a criminal as despicable as Saddam? The officer who breaks the law, who becomes a law unto himself, like the out-of-control cop played by Michael Chiklis in the Fox cable drama The Shield--"Al Capone with a badge," to borrow a line from the script--is more dangerous than the criminal and, like the American guards who committed the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, becomes a criminal himself. The false charge that Saddam was reaching for his weapons of mass destruction when US troops attacked bears an uncanny resemblance to the pretexts for the use of deadly force that document a long and shameful history of incidents of police misconduct in cities across America. The evil of this President, once acclaimed for his "moral clarity," is the evil of police violence on a global scale--the evil of the law-enforcement officer who regards himself as above the law and thereby undermines the very foundation of law and morality.

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Next, the Nation's Washington editor David Corn on our Secretary of State's surprise bombshell last Sunday:

Powell Admits False WMD Claim

It would be a foolish endeavor to call for this Republican Congress to mount a thorough investigation of this Republican administration. But what else is there to do in response to the comments made by Secretary of State Colin Powell this past weekend?

Appearing on Meet the Press, Powell acknowledged--finally!--that he and the Bush administration misled the nation about the WMD threat posed by Iraq before the war. Specifically, he said that he was wrong when he appeared before the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, and alleged that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons. That was one of the more dramatic claims he and the administration used to justify the invasion of Iraq. (Remember the drawings he displayed.) Yet Powell said on MTP, "it turned our that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading." Powell did not spell it out, but the main source for this claim was an engineer linked to the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, who is now part of the Iraqi Governing Council.

Powell noted that he was "comfortable at the time that I made the presentation it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community." In other words, the CIA was scammed by Chalabi's outfit, and it never caught on. So who's been fired over this? After all, the nation supposedly went to war partly due to this intelligence. And partly because of this bad information over 700 Americans and countless Iraqis have lost their lives. Shouldn't someone be held accountable?

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So what will history think of Mr. Powell's tenure at the State Department? Ah, who cares? As President Bush says, in the future, "we'll all be dead."

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