Ever hear the fable about the blind men and the elephant? It goes something like this: Once upon a time, an elephant found its way to a village where there lived six blind men. As none of them had ever
Ever hear the fable about the blind men and the elephant? It goes something like this:
Once upon a time, an elephant found its way to a village where there lived six blind men. As none of them had ever encountered a pachyderm, they thought they would go and touch it.
So the first blind man approached and touched the elephant’s stomach, concluding that the beast was like a wall. The second felt the tusk and decided the elephant was like a spear.
The third grabbed the squirming trunk and figured the elephant was like a snake. The fourth groped the leg and was convinced the elephant was like a tree.
The fifth chanced to feel the ear and declared the elephant like a fan. And the sixth seized the swinging tail and decided that the elephant was like a rope.
Each of the blind men thought he had figured the elephant out. But they all were wrong. Because not one had the complete picture.
This fable comes to mind amid the sound and fury this week that followed the Senate testimony of David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq.
Critics of the Iraq war on Capitol Hill, and in much of the U.S. media, are so blinded by their contempt for President Bush, their downright hatred in more extreme cases, that they focused almost exclusively on those snippets of Kay’s testimony that reinforced their anti-war, anti-Bush biases.
Kay’s remark about less-than-perfect pre-war intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction – ‘‘It turns out we were all wrong” – was deemed by those who report, who interpret the news to the American people as the biggest highlight of his Q&A with the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The next biggest highlight, judging from the evening newscasts and the morning newspapers, was Kay’s suggestion that there ought to be an outside inquiry as to why pre-war intelligence was as far off as it appears to have been.
But Kay said some other things that for some reason or another either didn’t make it into news stories or broadcast accounts, or were mentioned almost as an afterthought.
Indeed, the former weapons inspector reminded Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., that they talked on several occasions prior to the war, and that ‘‘my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.”
Yet, Kennedy and other Democrats – including presidential candidates John Kerry and Wesley Clark – wildly accuse President Bush of intentionally misleading the American people about Saddam’s buildup of WMD to justify going to war with Iraq.
And Kay’s statement that ‘‘we were almost all wrong” included not just those who supported the war here in the United States, but also those outside the United States who opposed the war.
‘‘Certainly,” Kay testified, ‘‘the French president (Jacques) Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq’s possession of WMD. The Germans certainly – the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.”
And while the Iraq Survey Group, a team of 1,400 scientists and experts that Kay headed until stepping down last week, did not uncover any major stockpiles of chemical, biological weapons, their work found that ‘‘Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of (U.N.) Resolution 1441,” which, as he noted, gave Iraq ‘‘one last chance to come clean about what it had.”
Saddam’s regime refused to take advantage of that one last chance, according to Kay.
His team discovered ‘‘hundreds of cases, based on documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the United Nations about this, they were instructed not to do it, and they hid material.”
The bottom line of Kay’s testimony, which anti-war critics on Capitol Hill, and Bush-haters in the media, chose to either underplay or ignore altogether, came in response to questioning from Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, the acting chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
Iraq was ‘‘even more dangerous than we thought,” said Kay, despite the fact that caches of WMD have not been found in the country (the U.S. weapons inspector previously suggested that Saddam’s stockpile might have been spirited to Syria).
‘‘I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and removal of Saddam Hussein,” he said, which sounded very much like an endorsement of President Bush’s decision to turn Saddam and his murderous regime out of power.
Of course, the anti-war critics, the Bush-haters refuse to see Kay’s testimony as anything other than validation of their views. They are just like the blind men and the elephant.
Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at mailto:Joseph.Perkins@UnionTrib.com.
Copyright 2003, Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
