An ABC News journalist once asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered: “So what's the difference?”
Those were astonishing words, even for famously indifferent George W. Bush. Nevertheless we should repeat the question: What difference, indeed, did it make? And the answer is: A huge one.
First, the world simply doesn't trust us any longer. Mr. Bush can pretend it was only because of some passing difference of opinion over some inconsequential difference about what was real and what was not, and what was necessary and what was not in response, but the loss of global trust has been severe. (For those neocon apologists who continue to advance the curious defense that the always-wrong Clinton administration and the always-wrong world also believed in damning evidence, just remember this much: They weren’t the ones who slapped on six-shooters and went blasting their way into Baghdad.)
Perhaps if the president engaged the world by at least reading newspapers he would grasp the unpleasant diplomatic fallout from crying wolf. According to a front-page report in the Washington Post last year, foreign policy analysts who had sat squarely in the president's pro-invasion corner were thrown into anguish over sinking, or, rather, sunken, U.S. credibility abroad. Defense Advisory Board member and war hawk Kenneth Adelman, for example, complained “the foreign policy blow-back” from the administration's hyperbole “is pretty serious.” And -- as a second, and more severe, consequence -- he noted the damage done to exercising legitimate actions against imminent threats in the future.
In effect, the Bush doctrine had one shot at proving itself justifiable, but the postwar absence of damning evidence only served to tie our hands instead. Former assistant to State Secretary Colin Powell and good Republican Richard Haass joined Adelman's critical ranks. Not only have U.S. allegations about North Korea 's nuclear capability been thrown into question as a result of the Iraqi WMD fiasco, similar and quite valid allegations against other hostile nations, said Haass, could be dismissed by the international community as so much swashbuckling. The giant gap between Bush's rhetoric and proven reality has made it “more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack,” Haass concluded.
One can try piercing that argument, but it would seem impenetrable. Only the blind would argue the administration's overblown warnings about Iraq did not alter and further limit U.S. options against real foreign dangers.
And therein lies the irony behind the president's repeated schoolyard taunt during the presidential campaign that political opponents would seek an international “permission slip” before acting again. Ironic, because that is the one course of action that Mr. Bush, more than anyone else, has helped establish as the only feasible course.
In the hope of building a real coalition against a real threat, future presidents will feel constrained to present piles upon piles of evidence that would make the stuff against O.J. look thin. America 's depleted credibility will demand titantic efforts to meet almost impossible thresholds of intelligence findings. Such a prerequisite to unified international action, which Bush has imposed through unprecedented recklessness, could someday prove to retard a well-advised U.S. response in accord with international law.
In these perilous times – when we most need friends to help combat vicious global threats without first feeling compelled to vet our every word – the president has only complicated America 's security. And that, Mr. Bush, is “the difference.”