In the days prior to the invasion of Iraq, were we deceived by President George W. Bush? The answer is: YES! The president and his inner circle deliberately misled the American people into believing that the threat posed by Iraq to the United States and its allies was grave and imminent.
The president, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Rice and a small core of advisors in and out of government deliberately deceived us with the intent of taking us to war with Iraq. Each of them stated repeatedly that Saddam Hussein’s army had weapons of mass destruction and that he posed an imminent and grave threat to our nation and its allies.
Those same people are now deconstructing that argument and attempting to deceive us again by saying that because part of that argument has turned out to have been based on faulty intelligence that the entire argument falters because the CIA and the intelligence agencies of our allies were wrong so they did not deceive us. This is wrong!
It is very unsettling to think that our intelligence was as bad as it turned out to be, but that is an irrelevant part of the argument. The real question was – based on the intelligence available to the president – should he have taken the nation to war? Let us examine the question and, further, assume the CIA and our allies were correct in their estimates of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam had at his disposal chemical and biological weapons and he was seeking to reconstitute his nuclear capacity.
The real question at that point was did Iraq constitute a threat sufficient to get us into the quagmire that we face today? Giving Saddam the benefit of the doubt on these issues, there is no way that a decision to invade should have been made. First, chemical weapons are useful when attacking defenseless people such as the Kurds resident in Iraq. They are useless and counterproductive against any modern state such as the U.S., Israel or any Muslim state in the region friendly to the U.S. The Germans discovered this in World War I when the allies used the same weapons against them and when the wind turned and blew the gas on their own soldiers.
Without hesitation, Hitler would have used chemical weapons in World War II had he thought they would be effective. The Geneva Convention and other treaties notwithstanding, Germany didn’t use them because they are ineffective. Saddam knew that and our professional military leaders knew it. Using these weapons against our allies in the region would have been tantamount to suicide for Saddam and his nation. And Saddam, as we learned from his hiding in a rabbit hole, was certainly not intent on becoming a suicide victim.
Biological weapons, while potentially far more dangerous than chemical weapons, pose almost all of the same problems for nations that would use them. Its citizens are not immune to the effects, and certainly the U.S. and its allies would have been able to check any threat of use by Iraq with the greater threat of massive retaliation. President Bush and his advisors had access to military advisors who could have told them this.
Assuming that Saddam was attempting to buy yellow cake uranium in Africa was correct – which it was not – Saddam would have been years away from developing a nuclear weapon. President Bush should have known this. Certainly Defense Department and Energy Department officials would have been pleased to supply this information if the question had been asked.
That our intelligence on WMDs was wrong was irrelevant. Even had Saddam been armed with the weaponry he was charged with having, he posed no grave or imminent threat to us or our allies as a result of such possession.
On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by terrorists, and President Bush properly said we would go after them and hunt down and kill or capture every last one of them. The U.S. demanded that Taliban give up Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. They refused and we declared them to be the enemy. We assembled an in international coalition to fight the Taliban and chase down the leadership of al Qaeda. The American nation was behind the president almost to a person.
Shortly after that, the public relations campaign against Saddam began. It was not clear to many that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the U.S. The false argument that there were WMDs and that everyone knew it was irrelevant. Again - was he an imminent threat was the real question?
Again, assuming he had these weapons, the United Nations and the first Bush and Clinton administrations were successfully containing Iraq with the sanctions and no-fly zone policies put in place after the Gulf War. Everything we have learned since the invasion has supported this conclusion.
Since our war leaders turned out not to be able to make their case on WMDs and in tying al Qaeda to Saddam’s government, the administration has dragged out the false argument that it is in our national security interests to promote democracy in Iraq as an appropriate reason fro the invasion and occupation. This has been an unmitigated disaster.
Muslims reject American interference even as many of them say they embrace some form of democracy. We are infidels and any government that comes out of our intervention will be viewed as illegitimate even if it meets the test of being democratic. Thus, the new government will be fair game for any rebels and jihadists so inclined.
All of the right wing pundits are slamming the Democrats in Congress for wanting to bring the troops home and are tarring them with the brush of Michael Moore and other left wing ideologues. The vast majority of those opposed to the war, including most Congressional Democrats, recognize the abject failure of the Bush Iraq War and occupation adventures but see that we simply can’t load up the boats tomorrow and bring them home.
Even Bush knows he’s totally lost his focus on the War on Terror and is looking for a way out of Iraq. The only question among mainstream people is the timing and condition of our withdrawal. The new Iraqi government must ultimately stand on its own, dependent on its own police and army. The way things are going now, the Shias and Kurds are running the show and are in no hurry to get us out of the fight with the Sunnis. The Kurds and Shias are going to inherit what they need from the war, relative autonomy and oil revenue. That the Sunnis, hated as they are by the other two major ethnic groups, are left with parched soil and no oil suits the other two’s interests almost perfectly.
We have created a power vacuum and are filling it ourselves; we must insist that it be filled by Iraqis sooner than later. Both Bush and the Democrats understand this. Bush wants to have a free hand in deciding when that is, and the Democrats want commitments as to when troop drawdown will begin in earnest – not just bringing home those added to the force during the election process.
The American people are beginning to fully comprehend the debacle that is happening in Iraq and no amount of right wing deception can restore the president’s sagging credibility. “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” It’s over.
Bush can save his presidency only by racing to the front in the direction that the American people are already marching. He better get at it soon; there are fewer followers every day.
Bush has created a calamity for the U.S. No one will deny that most Iraqis are personally better off – economically and politically – than under Saddam. But it is not clear that that the weakened state or states that will emerge from our folly will enhance our strategic position in the Middle East. It is likely that much greater instability from a bellicose Kurdish sector will enrage the Turks and others and a Shia tilt toward Iran - that is already evident - will weaken us greatly in the region.
All in all, this has been the greatest failure of any modern American presidency.
You bet we were deceived! You bet we are being deceived!
Blog on!
Wild Bill
