Eating Some Bush

ME also linked to this article on Slate.com by Fred Kaplan about the "Meet the Press" interview. Kaplan focuses on something completely different: a new corollary to Bush's policies on invasion.

I'm just gonna go ahead and quote the important bits here:

"First, President Bush seems to be vastly enlarging his doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. This doctrine originally declared that the United States has the right to attack a hostile power that possesses weapons of mass destruction. The idea was that we must sometimes strike first, in order to prevent the other side from striking us.

Now, however, the president is asserting a right to strike first not merely if a hostile power has deadly weapons or even if it is building such weapons, but also if it might build such weapons sometime in the future.

The original doctrine, though controversial, at least stemmed from the logic of self-defense. Bush's expansion of the doctrine, as implied in his remarks to Tim Russert, does not.

If no commentators have noted, or perhaps even noticed, this new spin on American military policy, it may be because they don't take Bush's unscripted remarks seriously. (It's just Bush, talking off the top of his head. No sense parsing the implications.) That in itself is quite a commentary on this president. But it's not clear that these particular remarks were unscripted. Bush used the same phrase—"a capacity to make a weapon"—three times; it was almost certainly a part of his brief. Either the statement means something—that we now reserve the right to wage pre-emptive war on a hostile power that has the mere capacity to make weapons of mass destruction—or it's empty blather. It's unclear which would be more unsettling.

Second, unless the president is defining the "capacity to make a weapon" in an extremely loose sense, David Kay said nothing of the sort. When Kay said he'd concluded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war, he elaborated with this comment: "We don't find the people, the documents, or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on."

No people, no documents, no physical plants—it doesn't sound like much "capacity."

On chemical weapons in particular, Kay said that Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed by President Clinton's air strikes in 1998. On biological weapons, Kay noted in his written report last October that his team had found laboratories that "may have engaged in research." On nuclear weapons, the report cited only "small and unsophisticated research initiatives … that could be useful in developing a weapons-related science base for the long term."