Eric's Beijing Diary

This morning on Dialogue, Yang Rui was interviewing George Shultz. Shultz gave a vigorous defense of the American presence in Iraq. Of course he had many good arguments, because he knows the story better than anyone. When asked about the weapons of mass destruction, he said, "It's a mystery." It is this mystery, I believe, which is at the heart of America's problems with the world community. Feelings about America's role in Iraq are by no means uniform in this country. Most people I have talked to are very glad that Saddam Hussein is gone. But there is growing concern about a world with one superpower. When the American's went to war, they said that war was necessitated by the fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I remember at the outset of the war, I was talking to one of my students at UAT, a young Jewish intellectual. I asked him if he thought the US would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He said, "Not only will they find them, but when they do, the weapons will say, 'Made in Germany, Made in France.'" When I pressed him on this, he said that the Mossad had agents in Iraq who had been speaking Arabic since they were five years old. Now the war is "over," there are no weapons of mass destruction, and we haven't heard a whisper from the Mossad.

One young thinker here in China confronted me recently about the American involvement in Afghanistan. He was concerned about the Americans invading a country without a clear mandate from the United Nations. I said, "No country is obligated to let the United Nations run their foreign policy. The United States was attacked, and had every reason to respond to that attack." You see, it is very easy for me to America's actions in the Afghan war, because that is one situation where the Americans clearly had a legitimate causus belli.

Many Americans feel that the invasion of Iraq was justified even if Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. But if that is true, then the Americans would have been better to take that position from the beginning. The decision to invade on the basis of provocation which has not been validated has created an integrity gap that seriously undermines the American position as a moral leader in the world community. George Shultz seems to believe that those weapons did indeed exist. I have a high regard for Shultz, and for the sake of America's relationship with the world, I hope he is right. But the fact that they have not been found strongly suggests that decisions were made on the basis of what a few people in positions of power really wanted to believe, rather than real, verifiable intelligence. Integrity does matter. The end does not justify the means. The way you do something, and your motives for that action are as important, and often more important, than the action itself.