TodayAnother song & dance review closes
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Movies come and go pretty quietly - with a few exceptions - but Broadway shows tend to mark their milestones with a lot of emotion.
Opening night for even the most-likely-to-flop production is still a special occasion, and a show's closing is fraught with many different emotions. There's relief that all the hard work is over, bereavement over the breakup of a professional family, nostalgia for the good nights as well as the really bad ones.
Those closing night emotions seem to be in evidence in Washington, D.C., as another long-running show comes to an end - the justification for the Iraq invasion.
Some would argue that show went dark a long time ago, but those who still claim to have front-row tickets should call their scalper. Sunday's interview with Richard Clarke on "60 Minutes" brought the curtain down decisively on this particular bit of play-acting.
Clarke was the top anti-terrorism expert in the Bush administration, a role he has filled continuously since the Reagan administration. In an interview timed to promote his new book, "Against All Enemies," he relates that Iraq was one of the big reasons the Bush administration dropped the ball on fighting terrorism before 9/11.
"It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier," Clark told CBS. "They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."
Clarke recalls the reaction he got from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz when he brought up Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Wolfowitz told Clarke, "No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al-Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
But Clarke asserted there had been no Iraqi terrorism directed at the United States other than the conspiracy to assassinate former President Bush when he visited Kuwait in 1993. That assessment was backed up by the CIA.
This dovetails with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account of how war with Iraq was on the agenda during the first week of the Bush administration.
Clarke was also in the room on Sept. 12, 2001, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his now-famous proposal to retaliate against Iraq for the 9/11 attacks. Told that al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld didn't even slow down, according to Clarke: "(He) said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq."
Back in 2000 we were frequently assured that a Bush administration would put the "grownups in charge" again. So it's not reassuring to hear that the 71-year-old Secretary of Defense responds to a poke in the eye from the school bully by coming home and beating up his little brother.
Listening to Clarke make his case, it's clearer than ever that we're not involved in Iraq for any of the reasons Bush and his advisors have cited publicly. The idea that Iraq was involved in 9/11 has been completely discredited, and the administration's rhetorical tactic of constantly mentioning both in the same sentence has been thoroughly deconstructed.
The David Kay investigation has thoroughly debunked the weapons of mass destruction argument once and for all. Kay has even said the president must "come clean" on the lack of weapons if he wants to regain his credibility.
The idea that we're spreading democracy to Iraq is a seductive one, since it speaks to our better nature. But why Iraq before Pakistan or North Korea, countries that actually have WMD? Why Iraq before Uzbekistan, a country perpetrating massive human rights violations right now, not 12 years ago? Why Iraq when the job in Afghanistan is far from finished?
Then there's that whole "'imminent threat" business. The Republican echo chamber has been promoting the quaint notion that "nobody" in the administration ever used those two words together. Rumsfeld tried to blow that one past the viewers of CBS' "Face the Nation" last week, only to have host Bob Schieffer put Rumsfeld's own words up on screen.
"No terror state poses a greater or more immediate threat," Rumsfeld previously said, "... than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq."
Other officials used such phrases as "grave threat," "unique and urgent threat" and the ever-popular "mushroom cloud" in connection with Iraq. If you have any Republicans on your Christmas list, mark them down for a thesaurus this year.
Just because this comedy of errors is closing down in Washington doesn't mean we've heard the last of it. We're certain to see a road company version of it accompanying the Republican election campaign this year, complete with further performances by the original cast.
Let's just hope this show closes out of town for lack of interest before they get the idea to mount a sequel.
