I Plead Not Guilty

President Bush and his minion are doing everything in their power to involve others in their ill conceived decision to attack Iraq. I don’t blame them; who would want to claim parenthood of that poor orphan? Unfortunately, they’ve been partially successful in sharing the responsibility in this public paternity play.

Those opposed to the war, especially Democratic politicians, have done a poor job in keeping the finger of public opinion pointed squarely at the president, his closest advisors (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Bolton, et al) leading neoconservatives in the private sector (Pearle, Podhoritz, the Kristols, etc.) and on leaders in the Evangelical Christian movement who have willingly sold their poor flocks on the terrible notion that doing bad was a good thing in this war.

Opponents of the war are spending their energy trying to determine whether the pre war intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities and programs was manufactured or manipulated by the administration in order to support the strike on Iraq. That’s a great question deserving close examination and an honest answer. But it permits the president and his merry band of clackers to fire the bovine waste into the fan and cover his critics with the result.

The Democrats and the rest of us opposed to the war have permitted ourselves to be herded by the administration onto its team of co-conspirators in the effort to topple the Baathist regime in Iraq. It’s really quite silly to blame Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, John Kerry, the Republicans and most of the Democrats in Congress, and poor little old Wild Bill for believing that Saddam had WMDs, the stated reason for the invasion. While most of the silly people in this list rail against inclusion on it, I ask why should this label us as co-conspirators with the president in the run up to the invasion?

That the CIA and the other world’s intelligence agencies believed Saddam had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and that he was seeking nuclear capacity and that those in Congress who supported the overthrow of the Iraqi regime had virtually the same information as the administration is a very handy debating tool of the president, but in reality it is merely a red herring to draw our attention away from the culpability of the small cabal of insiders that the public is finally zeroing in on which has brought death to more than 2,000 of our fighting men and women, killed 20,000 Iraqi civilian, and that is now approaching the quarter of a trillion dollars in wasted treasure.

The real question was and remains how much of a threat did Saddam’s Iraq pose to the United States? In retrospect, it is clear that the various inspection efforts by international bodies coupled with the degradation caused by American and allied activities in the no fly zones established in the wake of 1991 Gulf War were working very well in keeping the Iraqi government in check and in a weakened state. The real question should not be whether Saddam had WMDs but did he pose a threat to the U.S. sufficient for us to wage a preventive war against his government?

That last question is the one that must be examined and seems not to be on the radar screens of most opponents of the conflict and Congressional Committees looking it. Did the administration overstate the threat against us and our allies? If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the argument that virtually everyone thought he had WMDs and thus war was justified, we, along with George Bush and his inner circle, are doomed to be culpable for the resulting fiasco. The real question that must be answered by the Senate Intelligence Committee is whether the Administration manipulated intelligence to show an immediate threat against us, our forces, or our allies.

As long as the president can get away with saying the Congress was looking at the same information available to he when they voted to support the war, he has them where he wants them. The standard the opponents should be seeking is whether there was an imminent threat to our country or its allies.

Buying into the bovine waste that we are exporting Western style democracy as a fall back to failure to find WMDs or – most importantly – a direct and imminent threat to us or our friends is fatal to the real evil in this case – preventive rather preemptive war. It is in this that the conspirators – the president, his advisors on military and security matters, and his in the war supporters in and out of government, especially Evangelical Christian leaders - have done their greatest damage.

Even assuming that Saddam had his WMDs and that the war could be justified in religious terms, the failure to find these weapons and the threat to us these weapons represented clearly means that, in violation of international law, we executed a preventive attack on an innocent nation. No matter how reprehensible the leader and his administration was we attacked a nation that posed no real threat. If that is true – and I believe it is – we should be moving out as quickly as possible.

Evangelical Christians have been misled and they should be reassessing their position. They are supporting what has turned out to be an immoral and illegal attack on a nation that could do us no substantial harm. That the invaded nation was led by an immoral regime is no excuse for sending our men and women into harms way and to strain our armed forces to the point of danger to our country. And that says nothing abut the material cost that could have been used for any number of more worthy purposes.

Our goal should be to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible and to get on with hunting down the jihadists who are pledging to kill us.

Blog on!

Wild Bill