G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
What Every American Should Know About Iraq
By David Michael Green
Created Jun 15 2007 - 9:06am
Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and
occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George W.
Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a traitor,
or a geopolitical naif.
To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all
of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments herein,
nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I will even
include some of the comments and arguments made by the administration and
its supporters.
Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete
account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating
America's policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that
they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart - but
actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us to
educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.
Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The
very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about this
question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are
justified.
So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - "let Facts be
submitted to a candid world".
Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British
invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi people.
Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the
artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to
control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour said
at the time, "I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am
quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available".
Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll of
the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi leftists
whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in an
armed coup against the Iraqi government.
In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a
revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.
In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons, intelligence,
satellite data and funding for Saddam's Iraq to invade Iran, launching an
eight year war - the longest and probably the bloodiest of the post-WWII
era.
During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to
improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full
diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration's clear awareness
that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.
The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons
against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was the incident
George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam, "He gassed
his own people"), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales to Iraq of
highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons,
only two months after the Halabja incident.
George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the
1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites to
rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be
slaughtered by Saddam's military, in many cases right before the eyes of US
forces who were ordered not to intervene.
The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple
Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his National
Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, "Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending
the ground war into an occupation of Iraq ... would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. ...furthermore, we had been self
consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post cold
war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the
U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response
to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the
U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile
land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren -
outcome."
The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on Iraq.
Instead, he said: "You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of
strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to." Bush has also stated,
"I'm driven with a mission from God. ...God would tell me, 'George, go and
end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did."
George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a
friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his
autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time, saying
"'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when
he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to
invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to
get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a
successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush's beliefs on Iraq were
shaped by Dick Cheney's ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret
Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: "Start a small war. Pick a country
where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with Bush:
"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was one
of the keys to being a leader."
During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very little
about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent action.
Somehow, though, in just two years time - during which, if anything, Iraq
actually got weaker, not stronger - Saddam and his country became a perilous
and imminent threat that had to be addressed immediately.
Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to
invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before 9/11.
All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the why, the
justification, the costs or the wisdom.
Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in the
first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism advisor,
Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level security officials
to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11, and then the
meeting was 'hijacked' into discussing Iraq instead. In 2004, Clarke said
"Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re election
on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored
it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something
to stop 9/11." Clarke is a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, and also
served in the administrations of Bush's father, Ronald Reagan and Bill
Clinton.
Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, "The president dragged me into a
room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to
find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire
conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to
come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President.
We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with
an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq!
Saddam! Find out if there's a connection'. And in a very intimidating way. I
mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a
serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We
wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said,
'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up
to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or
Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it
again'."
Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the
administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it,
"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever".
Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist
organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes
ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein's Iraq was. Indeed,
even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19 alleged
hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent pressure from al
Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted this.
However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush constantly
conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the point where in
2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that Saddam had been
behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the administration
used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they had nothing
whatsoever to do with each other.
According to the internal top secret documents later leaked as the Downing
Street Memos, we know that the administration itself realized that "the case
was thin" for war against Iraq, because "Saddam was not threatening his
neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea
or Iran."
Nevertheless, the administration made an internal decision that the war
would be marketed around the supposed WMD threat, despite knowing it was
false. The allusions to mushroom clouds, centrifuge tubes and all the rest
were gross exaggerations and outright lies, and were known to be at the time
by the people making them. As the Downing Street Memos reveal, a decision
for war had already been made, and the public case for it was fabricated
afterwards: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
The president claimed in a state of the union speech that Saddam had gone
to Africa to get uranium, seriously alarming the American public. Before the
speech, the CIA had told the White House to remove that comment because it
was transparently false, based as it was on a crude forged letter.
Ultimately, the 'mistake' of including this lie was blamed on Deputy
National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was later punished for this
grave 'error' by being promoted to National Security Advisor. His former
boss, Condoleeza Rice, was punished by being promoted to Secretary of State.
When Joseph Wilson came home from a trip to Niger and told the truth about
the forged letter, the administration revealed the identity of his wife,
undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, thus potentially jeopardizing the lives
of all her contacts overseas. Eight witnesses recalled nine conversations
with Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in which Libby
blew Plame's cover - an act of treason - in order to punish a political
'enemy' for telling the truth. Libby claimed not to remember these nine
conversations. Both the jury and the judge in the case thought Libby was
unquestionably lying and convicted him of obstructing justice, with jurors
commenting that they felt sorry for him because he was obviously taking a
fall for Cheney.
The case regarding Saddam's chemical weapons capability was similarly
trumped up. It was based on the rantings of a single source, code-named
"Curveball", whose handlers in the German intelligence service had
repeatedly warned the administration that he was a drunk and a liar.
The administration continually relied upon Iraqi exiles, many of whom had
not set foot in the country for decades, as sources for information about
Iraq and as mouthpieces to justify the invasion. But it is unclear who was
using whom. Ahmad Chalabi, the most prominent of these, intended to use the
US military as a vehicle to become leader of Iraq. Despite being wanted for
massive bank fraud in Jordan, Chalabi convinced neoconservatives that he was
the "George Washington of Iraq". His Iraqi National Congress was the primary
source for Bush administration claims that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al Qaeda, neither of which was true. Chalabi gloated
about how his influence led the Bush administration to war, and the Pentagon
immediately flew him into Iraq following the invasion. The army of followers
that he had promised would rally around him never materialized, and his
party won zero parliamentary seats in the December 2005 elections.
Ultimately, the United States accused him of providing intelligence secrets
to the Iranian government and raided his offices.
Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council sealed the deal for
most Americans regarding the case for war. It later became apparent that
almost everything Powell said that day was false, and he has described this
episode as the low point in his career.
The Downing Street Memos reveal that the purpose of authorizing UN weapons
inspectors to go to Iraq was never actually to assess the threat and destroy
any weapons found. Instead, the purpose was to "wrongfoot" Saddam by getting
him to reject the inspectors, thus giving the American and British
governments a pretext for war. Tony Blair said "It would make a big
difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN
inspectors. If the political context were right, people would support regime
change."
To this day Bush claims that Saddam kicked out the inspectors. That had
been true five years previously, but not before the war. Hans Blix, the head
of the 2002-03 weapons inspection team reported that they were getting good
cooperation from the Iraqis, despite the fact that - as revealed by one of
the former team members - the US had inserted American spies into prior
international weapons inspection teams in Iraq.
At the time of the invasion in 2003, the weapons inspectors were nearly
done with their work, and only asked for a month or two more to finish. The
Bush administration claimed that the threat of Saddam and his WMD was too
grave and too urgent to wait. Bush's claim that Saddam kicked out the
inspectors is not only false, but masks the actual truth, which is that the
administration told the inspectors to leave because of the looming attack,
before they could finish their work and by so doing remove the rationale for
that attack.
As war loomed, Iraq made broad overtures to the United States to prevent
an invasion, offering to allow full, on-the-ground, American weapons
inspections, anti-terrorism cooperation, oil concessions, and even backing
for the US position in an Israeli/Palestinian peace plan. The only thing
Saddam balked at was regime change, but even then he offered to hold
elections within two years' time. The Americans were also informed by the
Iraqis at the time that there were no existing WMD. The Iraqi
representatives "could not understand why the Americans were focused on Iraq
rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported terrorists".
The Bush administration rejected their offer, despite that it met every
demand that Bush was publicly making.
Saddam had never attacked the United States, nor even threatened to do so.
In March of 2003, when the invasion was launched, Iraq was a gravely
weakened military and economic power which could not seriously threaten its
neighbors, let alone the United States. International sanctions had
seriously damaged its economy and killed vast numbers of its citizens,
including about 500,000 children. It had no serious weapons capability. It
had lost control over two-thirds of its own airspace to American and British
flyers.
In November of 2002, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution
1441, requiring that Iraq declare its WMD, disarm, and allow inspections to
verify that this has occurred. One week later Iraq announced that it would
accept the resolution, and the weapons inspectors were simultaneously
deployed.
Iraq submitted a report to the UN, as required, indicating that it
possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration
immediately and definitively asserted that Saddam was lying. In fact, since
Iraq had no WMD, and since Bush claimed that Saddam was unquestionably lying
in saying so, it was Bush who lied, not Saddam.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the supposed Iraqi WMD, "We know
where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east,
west, south and north somewhat". But the United States government had never
informed the UN weapons inspectors - a team that Bush had demanded be sent -
of where to find those weapons.
Two subsequent reports from teams sent to Iraq by the Bush administration
itself revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
though some people continue to this day to say there were some found there.
Moreover, these teams scientifically confirmed that such weapons are neither
missing nor hidden nor deported, but never existed after the mandated
weapons destruction which followed the Gulf War.
At one point Bush claimed that two small trailers found in the desert were
mobile "biological laboratories" and thus declared, "We have found the
weapons of mass destruction", seemingly vindicating his decision to go to
war. But even before he spoke, it was known by the Pentagon that these
trailers had nothing to do with WMD production, and that fact was reported
to Washington two days before the president's statement. Bush and other
administration officials continued to make the claim for nearly a year,
despite an unequivocal report filed from the field stating that the trailers
were not, and could not be, weapons labs. Scientists and engineers on the
investigating team referred to the trailers as ""the biggest sand toilets in
the world".
Added all together, what emerges from the above-listed facts is that all
the carnage and destruction that has ensued was based on the case that Iraq
was so imminent a threat - despite in fact being a very weak military
power - that America could not wait four to six more weeks for the weapons
inspectors to finish their work and reveal that it was no threat whatsoever.
All the world, including the Bush administration, clearly understood that
Security Council Resolution 1441 did not authorize an invasion of Iraq.
Thus, in March 2003, the US drafted a second resolution which would
explicitly do so. It needed nine out of fifteen votes, with no permanent
member vetoes, to pass. In a press conference, Bush was asked whether he
would call for a vote regardless of anticipated outcome. He responded, "No
matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see
people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the
utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time
for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when
it comes to Saddam." But after extensive American pressure, lobbying and
even spying on Security Council members, only four countries were prepared
to vote in favor of the resolution, with three of the five permanent members
opposing. The president quietly withdrew the resolution he had promised "no
matter what".
To this day Bush says in his speeches that Saddam did not comply with the
UN, that Saddam kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, and that Bush had
Security Council authorization to invade. None of those statements are true.
In 2004, after saying that the Iraqi threat of WMD was urgent, Bush was
asked by a reporter whether he had concerns about North Korea's nuclear
weapons development program, which - unlike Iraq's - was quite real. In
response, the president just opened his palms and shrugged. North Korea has
since actually tested a nuclear warhead. Yet there is little expressed
concern, the president almost never mentions it, there is no invasion being
planned and no war drums being beaten.
For that matter, there never was when the Soviet Union had more than
20,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ballistic missiles targeted on the US and
set to a hair trigger. Bush never explained why nuclear deterrence worked
against the Soviets with all their weapons for forty years, but couldn't
have had the same effect against Iraq today.
Bush also never explained why Iraq had to be invaded, even though more
than thirty countries had greater WMD capability at the time.
When the WMD and al Qaeda link rationales for the war were exploded, the
administration began arguing that its central purpose in invading Iraq was
to bring democracy to the country and to the Middle East. At the same time,
however, it has done next to nothing about Darfur, where more than 200,000
people have been murdered in a clear case of ongoing genocide. Since the
first requisite for being able to vote is to be alive, it is unclear how
invading Iraq in the name of democracy could be so urgent, yet saving lives
in Darfur of little concern and no action.
The administration was told in advance by American intelligence agencies
that there was a very high danger that Iraq could explode into ethnic chaos
following an invasion. It chose to attack anyhow.
According to former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, Bush was startled to
learn - in January 2003 - that there was a difference between Sunni and
Shiite Muslims. Responding to the three Iraqi exiles whom he had invited as
guests to the Super Bowl, Bush looked at them and said, "You mean...they're
not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?" As Bush
often likes to brag, he governs based on gut feelings, not on intelligence
or analysis. Those who know him state that he doesn't read books, and he
himself admitted he doesn't read newspapers.
Before the war, General Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that several
hundred thousand troops would be needed to govern this country of 25 million
people during a post-war occupation. But since the administration was
insisting that the war could be handled with far fewer troops and at far
less expense, General Shinseki and at least one other general who made the
same argument were publicly humiliated and had their long and prestigious
military careers terminated for political reasons. Four years later, Bush is
now 'surging' in Iraq by adding troops to the 140,000 or so that were
already there, in addition to the 80,000 or so highly expensive mercenaries
the taxpayers are funding. With the total now nearing 250,000 soldiers
occupying the country, it is still transparently not enough to keep the
peace.
To say that there was never a plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq is
technically incorrect. There was an extensive plan which the State
Department had put together, working with experts and Iraqi exiles. But
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn't want the State Department to
have the credit and control for the occupation, so he and Bush threw State's
document in the garbage. Then there was no plan.
Most of the Americans sent to staff the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) had no technical or professional training or experience in the work to
which they were assigned. Rather, they were chosen because they were
Republican Party loyalists.
One of the most significant blunders the United States committed during
the occupation was to dismiss the entire Iraqi Army, sending them home
unemployed and armed, along with anyone associated with the Ba'ath Party,
despite the fact that everyone who wanted to work at a professional level
anywhere in Iraqi society had been forced under Saddam to join the Party.
The first Chief Executive of the CPA, General Jay Garner, refused to purge
all Ba'athists from Iraqi governing institutions, and instead sought to
maximize Iraqi control of the post-war government as much as possible. He
was quickly fired.
As a result of this war, over 3,500 Americans are dead, and perhaps 20,000
or so are gravely wounded. Americans have not been allowed to see the
caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base.
The best, most scientific, and least politicized estimate of Iraqi dead
suggests that probably close to one million have now perished in the
country's post-war chaos, out of a population of 25 million.
Nearly four million Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes as
refugees from the violence, flooding Jordan and Syria, especially. The
United States allowed all of 202 refugees - many thousands of whom have been
targeted for death for having cooperated with the US occupation - to settle
in America in 2006. America's major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, is
building a wall to keep them out.
The United States has spent half a trillion dollars on the war, so far.
Estimates suggest that the number could rise to two trillion dollars before
the war is over and the continuing costs of medical care and economic
displacement are fully accounted for.
America's army has been described by Colin Powell as "broken". Almost all
our land forces are deployed in Iraq - a war of choice - leaving none for
use in a real foreign crisis.
Similarly, our National Guard and Reserve troops have been used in ways
that were never intended to fight this war - along with about 80,000 highly
expensive mercenaries - so that the president could avoid an unpopular
draft. This means that Guard and Reserve troops and their equipment are
unavailable for use in national emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.
As a result of the war, America is far more hated today throughout much of
the world, especially the Mid-East, and is seen as a imperialist power. The
Iraq invasion thus played directly into the hands of Islamic radicals like
Osama bin Laden.
America's own intelligence agencies concede that Iraq has become a giant
factory for the minting of new terrorists, where almost none existed prior
to the invasion.
Terrorist incidents worldwide have gone up seven-fold since, and largely
because of, the invasion of Iraq.
Iran, a country whose government truly does despise the United States, has
been an enormous beneficiary of the war. Prior to 2003, Iran was a natural
check on Iraq among Middle East powers, and vice versa. Now Iran is
enormously influential in Iraq and throughout the region, its growth in
power alarming its neighbors.
A very real possibility exists that the civil war now raging within Iraq
will become a regional war, perhaps drawing in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Jordan, Syria, Israel and others.
Gas prices have doubled since the war began. The potential also exists for
a global depression should further conflict limit the flow of oil to
industrialized countries, just as these economies were damaged by OPEC doing
the same thing in the 1970s.
To this day, American troops in Iraq do not have sufficient body or
vehicle armor, leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Communities across
America have literally held bake sales to raise funds for purchasing armor
for their own kids. When confronted by a soldier about this, then-Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, "You go to war with the Army you have.
They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time".
Companies like Halliburton, meanwhile, in which the Vice President still
maintains financial interests, have received multi-billion dollar contracts
for work in Iraq, without having to competitively bid for them, and with the
internal influence of Cheney's office in winning the assignments. Numerous
scandals have emerged from these contracts, including billing for work never
completed. Eight billion dollars in cash, entrusted to the Coalition
Provisional Authority, has gone missing in one incident alone.
Before the war, when they were marketing it to the public and Congress,
administration officials hinted that it would be quick, easy and cheap.
After the invasion, George Bush declared, under a "Mission accomplished"
banner, that fighting had ceased before the war had really even begun. It
has now lasted longer than America's involvement in World War Two, and the
administration has begun to talk about Iraq using the Korean model of a
fifty-year occupation.
The invasion of Iraq was supposedly part of an American 'war on
terrorism'. But, today, the United States is protecting Luis Posada from
extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, despite that Posada has bragged about
blowing up an airliner and killing seventy-three people on board, as well as
a string of other bombings of Cuban hotels and nightclubs. The government
claims that Posada cannot be extradited to Venezuela because he might be
tortured, even though Venezuela has no such reputation - but after
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the Attorney General's renouncing of the Geneva
Conventions, the United States now does.
None of the principals who decided to go to war in Iraq had ever seen
combat themselves. George W. Bush used his father's influence to avoid
service in Vietnam. John Ashcroft got seven draft deferments. Dick Cheney
got five deferments, and later said "I had better things to do in the
Sixties than fight in Vietnam". Neither Paul Wolfowitz nor Richard Perle nor
Condoleeza Rice ever served, and Donald Rumsfeld never fought in a war. The
only senior member of the administration who had was Colin Powell. Powell
advised Bush to be cautious about invading Iraq, and was thus sidelined from
discussions leading up to the war. George Bush's Secretary of State was not
informed of the decision to invade Iraq until after Prince Bandar, the Saudi
ambassador, had been told by the president.
While many can imagine political leaders making mistakes, most Americans
find it inconceivable that an American president could actually put personal
or political interests ahead of the national interest or the welfare of the
troops, especially on so grave an issue as war and peace.
But such individuals would do well to remember that there is a long history
of this sort of behavior, and that it is an unfortunate part of human
nature. The Europeans used to have an expression for this, which was all too
well earned from their own experiences. They noted that "War is the sport of
kings".
This is precisely why America's Founders so feared the concentration of
political power that they created a system devoted to spreading that power
out, through checks and balances, through federalism, and through guaranteed
civil liberties. Often those institutional obstacles have been successful at
preventing presidents from acting like kings, but sometimes not. During the
George W. Bush presidency, Congress has been a side-show, and many of
America's Bill of Rights-provided civil liberties have been shredded.
Some Americans may believe that, while Europeans have been unfortunate
enough to have suffered under warring governments, that could never happen
here. The truth, alas, is that it already has, many times. We know today
that the stories we were told by our government to justify US involvement in
the Mexican war, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War, for instance,
were complete and knowing fabrications, as the secret internal history of
the latter war - the Pentagon Papers - definitively proved in that case.
Today, Americans will have to decide for themselves whether George Bush's
invasion of Iraq to protect the United States from the threat of terrorism
was legitimate, or yet another example of a president sporting like a king,
at the expense of the American people, the troops, the Iraqis, and the
world.
Personally, I think the evidence above does exactly what I had intended it
would do in assembling it for this article. On the question of the
motivation and justification for George Bush's invasion of Iraq, it speaks
for itself.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By David Michael Green
Created Jun 15 2007 - 9:06am
Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and
occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George W.
Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a traitor,
or a geopolitical naif.
To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all
of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments herein,
nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I will even
include some of the comments and arguments made by the administration and
its supporters.
Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete
account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating
America's policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that
they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart - but
actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us to
educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.
Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The
very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about this
question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are
justified.
So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - "let Facts be
submitted to a candid world".
Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British
invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi people.
Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the
artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to
control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour said
at the time, "I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am
quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available".
Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll of
the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi leftists
whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in an
armed coup against the Iraqi government.
In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a
revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.
In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons, intelligence,
satellite data and funding for Saddam's Iraq to invade Iran, launching an
eight year war - the longest and probably the bloodiest of the post-WWII
era.
During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to
improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full
diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration's clear awareness
that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.
The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons
against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was the incident
George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam, "He gassed
his own people"), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales to Iraq of
highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture weapons,
only two months after the Halabja incident.
George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the
1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites to
rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be
slaughtered by Saddam's military, in many cases right before the eyes of US
forces who were ordered not to intervene.
The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple
Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his National
Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, "Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending
the ground war into an occupation of Iraq ... would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. ...furthermore, we had been self
consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post cold
war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the
U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response
to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the
U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile
land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren -
outcome."
The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on Iraq.
Instead, he said: "You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of
strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to." Bush has also stated,
"I'm driven with a mission from God. ...God would tell me, 'George, go and
end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did."
George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a
friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his
autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time, saying
"'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when
he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to
invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to
get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a
successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush's beliefs on Iraq were
shaped by Dick Cheney's ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret
Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: "Start a small war. Pick a country
where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with Bush:
"He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That was one
of the keys to being a leader."
During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very little
about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent action.
Somehow, though, in just two years time - during which, if anything, Iraq
actually got weaker, not stronger - Saddam and his country became a perilous
and imminent threat that had to be addressed immediately.
Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to
invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before 9/11.
All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the why, the
justification, the costs or the wisdom.
Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in the
first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism advisor,
Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level security officials
to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11, and then the
meeting was 'hijacked' into discussing Iraq instead. In 2004, Clarke said
"Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re election
on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored
it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something
to stop 9/11." Clarke is a Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, and also
served in the administrations of Bush's father, Ronald Reagan and Bill
Clinton.
Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, "The president dragged me into a
room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to
find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire
conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to
come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President.
We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with
an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and said, 'Iraq!
Saddam! Find out if there's a connection'. And in a very intimidating way. I
mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a
serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We
wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said,
'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up
to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or
Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it
again'."
Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the
administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it,
"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever".
Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist
organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes
ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein's Iraq was. Indeed,
even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19 alleged
hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent pressure from al
Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted this.
However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush constantly
conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the point where in
2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that Saddam had been
behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the administration
used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they had nothing
whatsoever to do with each other.
According to the internal top secret documents later leaked as the Downing
Street Memos, we know that the administration itself realized that "the case
was thin" for war against Iraq, because "Saddam was not threatening his
neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea
or Iran."
Nevertheless, the administration made an internal decision that the war
would be marketed around the supposed WMD threat, despite knowing it was
false. The allusions to mushroom clouds, centrifuge tubes and all the rest
were gross exaggerations and outright lies, and were known to be at the time
by the people making them. As the Downing Street Memos reveal, a decision
for war had already been made, and the public case for it was fabricated
afterwards: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
The president claimed in a state of the union speech that Saddam had gone
to Africa to get uranium, seriously alarming the American public. Before the
speech, the CIA had told the White House to remove that comment because it
was transparently false, based as it was on a crude forged letter.
Ultimately, the 'mistake' of including this lie was blamed on Deputy
National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was later punished for this
grave 'error' by being promoted to National Security Advisor. His former
boss, Condoleeza Rice, was punished by being promoted to Secretary of State.
When Joseph Wilson came home from a trip to Niger and told the truth about
the forged letter, the administration revealed the identity of his wife,
undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, thus potentially jeopardizing the lives
of all her contacts overseas. Eight witnesses recalled nine conversations
with Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in which Libby
blew Plame's cover - an act of treason - in order to punish a political
'enemy' for telling the truth. Libby claimed not to remember these nine
conversations. Both the jury and the judge in the case thought Libby was
unquestionably lying and convicted him of obstructing justice, with jurors
commenting that they felt sorry for him because he was obviously taking a
fall for Cheney.
The case regarding Saddam's chemical weapons capability was similarly
trumped up. It was based on the rantings of a single source, code-named
"Curveball", whose handlers in the German intelligence service had
repeatedly warned the administration that he was a drunk and a liar.
The administration continually relied upon Iraqi exiles, many of whom had
not set foot in the country for decades, as sources for information about
Iraq and as mouthpieces to justify the invasion. But it is unclear who was
using whom. Ahmad Chalabi, the most prominent of these, intended to use the
US military as a vehicle to become leader of Iraq. Despite being wanted for
massive bank fraud in Jordan, Chalabi convinced neoconservatives that he was
the "George Washington of Iraq". His Iraqi National Congress was the primary
source for Bush administration claims that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al Qaeda, neither of which was true. Chalabi gloated
about how his influence led the Bush administration to war, and the Pentagon
immediately flew him into Iraq following the invasion. The army of followers
that he had promised would rally around him never materialized, and his
party won zero parliamentary seats in the December 2005 elections.
Ultimately, the United States accused him of providing intelligence secrets
to the Iranian government and raided his offices.
Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council sealed the deal for
most Americans regarding the case for war. It later became apparent that
almost everything Powell said that day was false, and he has described this
episode as the low point in his career.
The Downing Street Memos reveal that the purpose of authorizing UN weapons
inspectors to go to Iraq was never actually to assess the threat and destroy
any weapons found. Instead, the purpose was to "wrongfoot" Saddam by getting
him to reject the inspectors, thus giving the American and British
governments a pretext for war. Tony Blair said "It would make a big
difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN
inspectors. If the political context were right, people would support regime
change."
To this day Bush claims that Saddam kicked out the inspectors. That had
been true five years previously, but not before the war. Hans Blix, the head
of the 2002-03 weapons inspection team reported that they were getting good
cooperation from the Iraqis, despite the fact that - as revealed by one of
the former team members - the US had inserted American spies into prior
international weapons inspection teams in Iraq.
At the time of the invasion in 2003, the weapons inspectors were nearly
done with their work, and only asked for a month or two more to finish. The
Bush administration claimed that the threat of Saddam and his WMD was too
grave and too urgent to wait. Bush's claim that Saddam kicked out the
inspectors is not only false, but masks the actual truth, which is that the
administration told the inspectors to leave because of the looming attack,
before they could finish their work and by so doing remove the rationale for
that attack.
As war loomed, Iraq made broad overtures to the United States to prevent
an invasion, offering to allow full, on-the-ground, American weapons
inspections, anti-terrorism cooperation, oil concessions, and even backing
for the US position in an Israeli/Palestinian peace plan. The only thing
Saddam balked at was regime change, but even then he offered to hold
elections within two years' time. The Americans were also informed by the
Iraqis at the time that there were no existing WMD. The Iraqi
representatives "could not understand why the Americans were focused on Iraq
rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported terrorists".
The Bush administration rejected their offer, despite that it met every
demand that Bush was publicly making.
Saddam had never attacked the United States, nor even threatened to do so.
In March of 2003, when the invasion was launched, Iraq was a gravely
weakened military and economic power which could not seriously threaten its
neighbors, let alone the United States. International sanctions had
seriously damaged its economy and killed vast numbers of its citizens,
including about 500,000 children. It had no serious weapons capability. It
had lost control over two-thirds of its own airspace to American and British
flyers.
In November of 2002, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution
1441, requiring that Iraq declare its WMD, disarm, and allow inspections to
verify that this has occurred. One week later Iraq announced that it would
accept the resolution, and the weapons inspectors were simultaneously
deployed.
Iraq submitted a report to the UN, as required, indicating that it
possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration
immediately and definitively asserted that Saddam was lying. In fact, since
Iraq had no WMD, and since Bush claimed that Saddam was unquestionably lying
in saying so, it was Bush who lied, not Saddam.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the supposed Iraqi WMD, "We know
where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east,
west, south and north somewhat". But the United States government had never
informed the UN weapons inspectors - a team that Bush had demanded be sent -
of where to find those weapons.
Two subsequent reports from teams sent to Iraq by the Bush administration
itself revealed that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
though some people continue to this day to say there were some found there.
Moreover, these teams scientifically confirmed that such weapons are neither
missing nor hidden nor deported, but never existed after the mandated
weapons destruction which followed the Gulf War.
At one point Bush claimed that two small trailers found in the desert were
mobile "biological laboratories" and thus declared, "We have found the
weapons of mass destruction", seemingly vindicating his decision to go to
war. But even before he spoke, it was known by the Pentagon that these
trailers had nothing to do with WMD production, and that fact was reported
to Washington two days before the president's statement. Bush and other
administration officials continued to make the claim for nearly a year,
despite an unequivocal report filed from the field stating that the trailers
were not, and could not be, weapons labs. Scientists and engineers on the
investigating team referred to the trailers as ""the biggest sand toilets in
the world".
Added all together, what emerges from the above-listed facts is that all
the carnage and destruction that has ensued was based on the case that Iraq
was so imminent a threat - despite in fact being a very weak military
power - that America could not wait four to six more weeks for the weapons
inspectors to finish their work and reveal that it was no threat whatsoever.
All the world, including the Bush administration, clearly understood that
Security Council Resolution 1441 did not authorize an invasion of Iraq.
Thus, in March 2003, the US drafted a second resolution which would
explicitly do so. It needed nine out of fifteen votes, with no permanent
member vetoes, to pass. In a press conference, Bush was asked whether he
would call for a vote regardless of anticipated outcome. He responded, "No
matter what the whip count is, we're calling for the vote. We want to see
people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the
utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It's time
for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand when
it comes to Saddam." But after extensive American pressure, lobbying and
even spying on Security Council members, only four countries were prepared
to vote in favor of the resolution, with three of the five permanent members
opposing. The president quietly withdrew the resolution he had promised "no
matter what".
To this day Bush says in his speeches that Saddam did not comply with the
UN, that Saddam kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, and that Bush had
Security Council authorization to invade. None of those statements are true.
In 2004, after saying that the Iraqi threat of WMD was urgent, Bush was
asked by a reporter whether he had concerns about North Korea's nuclear
weapons development program, which - unlike Iraq's - was quite real. In
response, the president just opened his palms and shrugged. North Korea has
since actually tested a nuclear warhead. Yet there is little expressed
concern, the president almost never mentions it, there is no invasion being
planned and no war drums being beaten.
For that matter, there never was when the Soviet Union had more than
20,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ballistic missiles targeted on the US and
set to a hair trigger. Bush never explained why nuclear deterrence worked
against the Soviets with all their weapons for forty years, but couldn't
have had the same effect against Iraq today.
Bush also never explained why Iraq had to be invaded, even though more
than thirty countries had greater WMD capability at the time.
When the WMD and al Qaeda link rationales for the war were exploded, the
administration began arguing that its central purpose in invading Iraq was
to bring democracy to the country and to the Middle East. At the same time,
however, it has done next to nothing about Darfur, where more than 200,000
people have been murdered in a clear case of ongoing genocide. Since the
first requisite for being able to vote is to be alive, it is unclear how
invading Iraq in the name of democracy could be so urgent, yet saving lives
in Darfur of little concern and no action.
The administration was told in advance by American intelligence agencies
that there was a very high danger that Iraq could explode into ethnic chaos
following an invasion. It chose to attack anyhow.
According to former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, Bush was startled to
learn - in January 2003 - that there was a difference between Sunni and
Shiite Muslims. Responding to the three Iraqi exiles whom he had invited as
guests to the Super Bowl, Bush looked at them and said, "You mean...they're
not, you know, there, there's this difference. What is it about?" As Bush
often likes to brag, he governs based on gut feelings, not on intelligence
or analysis. Those who know him state that he doesn't read books, and he
himself admitted he doesn't read newspapers.
Before the war, General Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that several
hundred thousand troops would be needed to govern this country of 25 million
people during a post-war occupation. But since the administration was
insisting that the war could be handled with far fewer troops and at far
less expense, General Shinseki and at least one other general who made the
same argument were publicly humiliated and had their long and prestigious
military careers terminated for political reasons. Four years later, Bush is
now 'surging' in Iraq by adding troops to the 140,000 or so that were
already there, in addition to the 80,000 or so highly expensive mercenaries
the taxpayers are funding. With the total now nearing 250,000 soldiers
occupying the country, it is still transparently not enough to keep the
peace.
To say that there was never a plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq is
technically incorrect. There was an extensive plan which the State
Department had put together, working with experts and Iraqi exiles. But
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn't want the State Department to
have the credit and control for the occupation, so he and Bush threw State's
document in the garbage. Then there was no plan.
Most of the Americans sent to staff the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA) had no technical or professional training or experience in the work to
which they were assigned. Rather, they were chosen because they were
Republican Party loyalists.
One of the most significant blunders the United States committed during
the occupation was to dismiss the entire Iraqi Army, sending them home
unemployed and armed, along with anyone associated with the Ba'ath Party,
despite the fact that everyone who wanted to work at a professional level
anywhere in Iraqi society had been forced under Saddam to join the Party.
The first Chief Executive of the CPA, General Jay Garner, refused to purge
all Ba'athists from Iraqi governing institutions, and instead sought to
maximize Iraqi control of the post-war government as much as possible. He
was quickly fired.
As a result of this war, over 3,500 Americans are dead, and perhaps 20,000
or so are gravely wounded. Americans have not been allowed to see the
caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base.
The best, most scientific, and least politicized estimate of Iraqi dead
suggests that probably close to one million have now perished in the
country's post-war chaos, out of a population of 25 million.
Nearly four million Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes as
refugees from the violence, flooding Jordan and Syria, especially. The
United States allowed all of 202 refugees - many thousands of whom have been
targeted for death for having cooperated with the US occupation - to settle
in America in 2006. America's major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, is
building a wall to keep them out.
The United States has spent half a trillion dollars on the war, so far.
Estimates suggest that the number could rise to two trillion dollars before
the war is over and the continuing costs of medical care and economic
displacement are fully accounted for.
America's army has been described by Colin Powell as "broken". Almost all
our land forces are deployed in Iraq - a war of choice - leaving none for
use in a real foreign crisis.
Similarly, our National Guard and Reserve troops have been used in ways
that were never intended to fight this war - along with about 80,000 highly
expensive mercenaries - so that the president could avoid an unpopular
draft. This means that Guard and Reserve troops and their equipment are
unavailable for use in national emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina.
As a result of the war, America is far more hated today throughout much of
the world, especially the Mid-East, and is seen as a imperialist power. The
Iraq invasion thus played directly into the hands of Islamic radicals like
Osama bin Laden.
America's own intelligence agencies concede that Iraq has become a giant
factory for the minting of new terrorists, where almost none existed prior
to the invasion.
Terrorist incidents worldwide have gone up seven-fold since, and largely
because of, the invasion of Iraq.
Iran, a country whose government truly does despise the United States, has
been an enormous beneficiary of the war. Prior to 2003, Iran was a natural
check on Iraq among Middle East powers, and vice versa. Now Iran is
enormously influential in Iraq and throughout the region, its growth in
power alarming its neighbors.
A very real possibility exists that the civil war now raging within Iraq
will become a regional war, perhaps drawing in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran,
Jordan, Syria, Israel and others.
Gas prices have doubled since the war began. The potential also exists for
a global depression should further conflict limit the flow of oil to
industrialized countries, just as these economies were damaged by OPEC doing
the same thing in the 1970s.
To this day, American troops in Iraq do not have sufficient body or
vehicle armor, leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Communities across
America have literally held bake sales to raise funds for purchasing armor
for their own kids. When confronted by a soldier about this, then-Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, "You go to war with the Army you have.
They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time".
Companies like Halliburton, meanwhile, in which the Vice President still
maintains financial interests, have received multi-billion dollar contracts
for work in Iraq, without having to competitively bid for them, and with the
internal influence of Cheney's office in winning the assignments. Numerous
scandals have emerged from these contracts, including billing for work never
completed. Eight billion dollars in cash, entrusted to the Coalition
Provisional Authority, has gone missing in one incident alone.
Before the war, when they were marketing it to the public and Congress,
administration officials hinted that it would be quick, easy and cheap.
After the invasion, George Bush declared, under a "Mission accomplished"
banner, that fighting had ceased before the war had really even begun. It
has now lasted longer than America's involvement in World War Two, and the
administration has begun to talk about Iraq using the Korean model of a
fifty-year occupation.
The invasion of Iraq was supposedly part of an American 'war on
terrorism'. But, today, the United States is protecting Luis Posada from
extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, despite that Posada has bragged about
blowing up an airliner and killing seventy-three people on board, as well as
a string of other bombings of Cuban hotels and nightclubs. The government
claims that Posada cannot be extradited to Venezuela because he might be
tortured, even though Venezuela has no such reputation - but after
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and the Attorney General's renouncing of the Geneva
Conventions, the United States now does.
None of the principals who decided to go to war in Iraq had ever seen
combat themselves. George W. Bush used his father's influence to avoid
service in Vietnam. John Ashcroft got seven draft deferments. Dick Cheney
got five deferments, and later said "I had better things to do in the
Sixties than fight in Vietnam". Neither Paul Wolfowitz nor Richard Perle nor
Condoleeza Rice ever served, and Donald Rumsfeld never fought in a war. The
only senior member of the administration who had was Colin Powell. Powell
advised Bush to be cautious about invading Iraq, and was thus sidelined from
discussions leading up to the war. George Bush's Secretary of State was not
informed of the decision to invade Iraq until after Prince Bandar, the Saudi
ambassador, had been told by the president.
While many can imagine political leaders making mistakes, most Americans
find it inconceivable that an American president could actually put personal
or political interests ahead of the national interest or the welfare of the
troops, especially on so grave an issue as war and peace.
But such individuals would do well to remember that there is a long history
of this sort of behavior, and that it is an unfortunate part of human
nature. The Europeans used to have an expression for this, which was all too
well earned from their own experiences. They noted that "War is the sport of
kings".
This is precisely why America's Founders so feared the concentration of
political power that they created a system devoted to spreading that power
out, through checks and balances, through federalism, and through guaranteed
civil liberties. Often those institutional obstacles have been successful at
preventing presidents from acting like kings, but sometimes not. During the
George W. Bush presidency, Congress has been a side-show, and many of
America's Bill of Rights-provided civil liberties have been shredded.
Some Americans may believe that, while Europeans have been unfortunate
enough to have suffered under warring governments, that could never happen
here. The truth, alas, is that it already has, many times. We know today
that the stories we were told by our government to justify US involvement in
the Mexican war, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War, for instance,
were complete and knowing fabrications, as the secret internal history of
the latter war - the Pentagon Papers - definitively proved in that case.
Today, Americans will have to decide for themselves whether George Bush's
invasion of Iraq to protect the United States from the threat of terrorism
was legitimate, or yet another example of a president sporting like a king,
at the expense of the American people, the troops, the Iraqis, and the
world.
Personally, I think the evidence above does exactly what I had intended it
would do in assembling it for this article. On the question of the
motivation and justification for George Bush's invasion of Iraq, it speaks
for itself.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson