‘Black Hawk Down’ author suggests Bush lied about Iraq’s WMD

You know the administration is having some trouble on an issue when the president’s biggest supporters start turning the other way.

Case in point: Mark Bowden, widely known for writing the award-winning book “Black Hawk Down,” was a vociferous supporter of Bush’s war in Iraq. He spoke publicly on numerous occasions about the utility and necessity of “regime change” in Iraq, and argued this was a war that would make the world safer.

Now, however, Bowden is drawing different conclusions.

“I supported this war because I believed Bush and Blair when they said Iraq was manufacturing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction,” Bowden wrote in an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Such weapons in the hands of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that shared Hussein’s hostile designs made such a threat a defense priority — or so the argument went.”

Bowden’s new concerns, questioning what he believed just a few months ago, are based on the failure of the administration to find the WMD arsenal that Bush assured the world existed and threatened global peace and stability.

“[The weapons] may yet be found, but it is beginning to look as though the skeptics in this case were right,” Bowden said. “If so, I was taken in by this administration, and America and Great Britain were led to war under false pretenses.”

Reminiscent of Paul Krugman from earlier this week, Bowden explains, “I can imagine no greater breach of public trust than to mislead a country into war.”

Bowden sounds like a man betrayed.

“I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him,” Bowden writes. He concludes, “When a president lies or exaggerates in making an argument for war, when he spins the facts to sell his case, he betrays his public trust, and he diminishes the credibility of his office and our country. We are at war. What we lost in this may yet end up being far more important than what we gained.”

There are no subtleties or ambiguities about these sentiments, and more importantly, they come from a man who enthusiastically supported the president’s efforts.

It seems increasingly clear that Bush’s critics will be holding the administration responsible for the absence of WMD in Iraq. As the New York Times’ Tom Friedman explained yesterday, “The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is becoming a big, big story.”

And Friedman’s colleague, Maureen Dowd, wrote in her Times column, “For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over…. The Bush crowd practiced bait and switch.”

For a while, it looked like Americans were prepared to just look the other way on this issue, gratified that the war was quick and U.S. casualties were few. That no longer appears to be the case. Promises were made, lives were lost, and American integrity has been called into question. People apparently expect an explanation.

This does not mean that if U.S. troops discover a vial of anthrax tomorrow that the entire invasion was justified, but it does mean that if these elusive WMD never appear, Bush’s credibility will have suffered a serious, if not irreparable, blow.