New CSM column: the U.S. and the rest

My latest column is in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. It’s a call for US citizens to start reflecting seriously on our rightful place in the world.
I ask, “How, during the year ahead, do we hope to see the 4 percent of the world’s population who are US citizens interacting with the other 96 percent?”
I look quickly at some of the more egregiously bad aspects of the war Washington launched against Iraq in 2003, then I conclude:

What’s needed in the year ahead is a serious attempt by all who aspire to US leadership to evaluate what went wrong in the lead up to, and conduct of, the war. How did US leaders get the facts about Iraq’s weapons programs so very wrong? Why was the planning for the aftermath of the war so very flawed? Why was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed to do so much to alienate key US allies overseas, and to undermine the guiding principles of the UN? Why has no one been held accountable?
At the same time, Americans need to think long and hard about the quality of their nation’s ties to the rest of the world. Global democratization is progressing, and the more democratic the world and its governance become, the more US citizens will have to rely on its nation’s relationship with others for their own security and well-being.
Americans are, after all, only a tiny minority of the world’s people. It’s time the US government recognized that, stopped trying to throw its weight around, and grew up.

Actually, much of the body of the piece was an accusation that (hawks in the) the administration had unacceptably politicized the intelligence on Saddam’s WMDs, and his ties to Al-Qaeda, in order to build public and political support for the war…

I was a little surprised, when I started reading the WaPo‘s big story on the Iraqi WMD programs today, to see that the apparent tenor of the lead was, “Gee whiz, look what we’ve found out about what they were doing!”
Made it almost seem like they’d found something significant… But what they’d found out about Iraq’s WMD program was significant–as you discovered if you read a few paras further on–mainly for being, as it were, so insignificant.
The “bottom line” in the piece–which in a better edit would surely have made it to the leed– was as follows:

investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen — combining pox virus and snake venom — that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a “grave and gathering danger” by President Bush and a “mortal threat” by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s…

Anyway, in my column, I do raise the important issue of the need for trustworthiness, open-ness, and honesty in governments that put themselves forth as exemplars of democracy.
I see that in Britain, meanwhile, Lord Hutton is about to produce the results of his enquiry, which has been looking at some aspects of how Blair’s government cherrypicked the intel in late 2002 to bolster the case for war. I think Lord H is due to submit his report some time next week– though it seems he has acceded to the government’s request that he not publish all of the documents his Enquiry received.
But speculation that his report may be very damaging to Blair already has all Britain sitting on the edge of its seats. Thursday’s Guardian is reporting:

Tony Blair was forced on to the defensive yesterday when he admitted that he would have to resign as prime minister if he lied to parliament over his role in the outing of the government scientist, Dr David Kelly.
As Lord Hutton warned Britain’s political classes against jumping to conclusions ahead of the publication of his report, the prime minister said he “of course” accepted that ministers who misled MPs had to quit.
Mr Blair’s remarks came after [the new leader of the opposition Tory Party] Michael Howard all but accused the prime minister of lying days after the death of Dr Kelly…

In Britain, the work of the Hutton Inquiry, including all its investigations into how the intel leading up to the war was carefully chosen and massaged, came about as a result almost of happenstance– namely, after leading government scientist David Kelly killed himself over allegations of having leaked government secrets.
Turned out that the trusting Dr. Kelly had been hung out to dry as a fall guy by some bullying types in the MOD who wanted to divert the media from a real trail of lying, intel-cherrypicking, and other improprieties that led dangerously close to Blair’s office. Blair’s chief hench-person Alasdair Campbell had to resign along the way there…
In the US, by contrast, no-one in power has yet been held to any kind of accountability for all the exactly parallel improprieties that were being committed here… Yet many more US soldiers than British soldiers have had to lose their lives because of the quite manufactured and unnecessary launching of the war back in March…
Go figure.