CAMPAIGNS.(The Talk of the Town)(Iraq War, 2003)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

As the war in Iraq enters its second year, Americans find themselves trapped in an epistemological black hole: the war's end recedes into an indefinite future while its beginning grows daily more contentious and obscure. Before the war, the sight of United Nations arms inspectors emerging empty-handed from Iraqi arms depots suspected of harboring large stocks of biological and chemical weapons brought a typically oracular pronouncement from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Absence of evidence," he said, "is not evidence of absence." The inspectors' inability to turn up weapons of mass destruction cast doubt not on their existence but on the proposition that inspections--or anything short of an invasion and occupation of Iraq--could ever find them. War was imperative.

Then, on January 28th of this year, absence of evidence became, precisely, evidence of absence. That day, David Kay, who headed the Iraq Survey Group, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the arsenals President Bush had depicted as the heart of a "gathering threat" that compelled the country to go to...

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