The Week

National Review, Feb 24, 2003

-- Secretary of State Powell left something out that might even win over the Left. In meetings with Iraqi children, cigar-loving Saddam routinely exposes them to a weapon of mass destruction-second-hand smoke.

-- Late January and early February saw a shift in domestic and international opinion toward President Bush's Iraq policy. In his exhaustive presentation before the U.N. on Feb. 5, Powell made an irrefutable case that Saddam Hussein has been defying the U.N. by hiding prohibited weapons systems and otherwise working to thwart inspections. Powell also revealed a terrorist cell in Baghdad that has been operating under the leadership of Abu Musab Zarqawi. And he exploded the limp conventional wisdom that the secular Saddam couldn't possibly cooperate with bin Laden's Islamic radicals. (Their hatred of the West unites them.) The secretary of state was following up on a forceful argument for confronting Saddam by Bush himself in his State of the Union address, and a damning report to the U.N. by Hans Blix. The head inspector has done what he can to avert war, but he nevertheless presented evidence that strengthened the case for it. Meanwhile, eight European leaders published a letter in the Wall Street Journal declaring that they stand with Bush against the Iraqi regime and urging the U.N. Security Council to "face up to its responsibilities." Suddenly it was France and Germany that were looking isolated. Polls show that support for war with Iraq has crept upward in the U.S. Most Americans support it even in the absence of a U.N. sign- off-and even if the war will last long and casualties will be high. The president would be obligated to defang Iraq even if the polls went the other way, of course. But as Bush's critics have long said, it's good to have allies.

-- Our allies and the public have become more supportive of a war to change the Iraqi regime; the Democrats just seem to get more confused. A few support the war: Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Evan Bayh. Some are forthright opponents. These include presidential candidate Howard Dean and former president Jimmy Carter, who passes for an elder statesman among the Democrats. (Carter blames Bush for the "vituperative attacks on U.S. policy by famous and respected men" such as Nelson Mandela and John Le Carre. Not to mention singer Sheryl Crow.) Other Democrats are trying to support and oppose war at the same time. Tom Daschle voted to authorize war last fall, but now says that the burden of proof is on the president to show that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction-a position well to the left of the latest U.N. resolution. John Kerry insists that the president does not have a blank check to make war, although he, along with Daschle and a majority of Congress, voted to give him precisely that. Kerry says that while his support for a war is "not contingent" on Security Council authorization, "it would be better" to have it. That's not an unreasonable position; it is in fact the Bush administration's position. But Kerry imagines, or wants to pretend, that taking it establishes him as a critic of the warmongers in the White House. When all else fails, Democrats change the subject to attack Bush from the right. In his response to the State of the Union address, Washington governor Gary Locke said that while the administration busies itself with Iraq, "Osama bin Laden is still at large." All the Democrats say that the president needs to "make the case" more forcefully before he acts. What case would be sufficient is never spelled out; and the more Bush makes the case the higher the bar seems to get. All the Democrats plead for more time, more talk, more allies, more consultation. They know that once war starts, the party's divisions will only grow.

-- Here's your challenge: Say you're a member of the Senate, perhaps a liberal Democrat from New York whose name is not Clinton. You have a place on the Judiciary Committee and take a great interest in judicial nominations. And you really, really, really don't want to see Miguel Estrada-the White House's extraordinarily bright and able nominee to a place on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals-win confirmation. Yet you have no evidence of any wrongdoing, improprieties, or legal missteps to use against him. What do you do? If you're Sen. Charles Schumer, you argue that Estrada is unqualified not because of anything he has done but because you, Charles Schumer, don't know enough about him. You argue that Estrada is a "stealth candidate" and that there are too many unanswered questions about him to risk confirmation. You then toss in a couple of objections-they're not meaningful enough to be called allegations-that one of Estrada's former bosses called him a conservative ideologue (even though that boss gave Estrada glowing performance evaluations when the two worked together), or that Estrada defended an anti-loitering law that some civil-rights groups didn't like. Put it all together and you've got . . . nothing. But that hasn't stopped Sen. Schumer from trying to derail the Estrada nomination. We can only hope that the full Senate, with a quick confirmation vote, will.