So: if George Bush had said that he wanted to go to war
against Iraq
because Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, would the nation have gone along?
           That’s the
only rationale left for Bush’s war.
           There were no weapons of mass destruction.
           Saddam
Hussein was not planning, and did not
have the capability, to launch an attack against the US.
           There was no link between Saddam and 9/11.
           A bipartisan
Senate committee has confirmed it all.
           We have
sent hundreds of American soldiers and civilians — and thousands of Iraqis
— to their deaths. And now everybody knows that the president was either
lying or didn’t know what he was talking about when he told us why we were
doing it.
           We took an
international community that had joined us in mourning the losses of 9/11 and
turned it against us. We squandered the trust and good will of world leaders.
And now we are fighting a second war, against Iraqi insurgents. And we’re
spending billions of dollars trying to patch that poor country together.
           The Bush
administration is trying to blame the CIA for the faulty intelligence. But it
does not take a foreign-policy genius to connect the dots. The Bush administration
was taking us to war, and it used 9/11 and any intelligence reports it could
find — no matter how flimsy — to sell a cowardly Congress on the war.
           The Bush
administration lied to the American public. It lied to us as we headed into
war. And it is lying to us still.
           Vice
President Dick Cheney continues to say there was probably a link between Iraq
and Al Qaeda. President Bush insisted on Monday that Saddam Hussein “had the
capability of producing weapons of mass murder.”
           And Bush’s
reaction to the Senate committee’s report? America
is safer today with Saddam gone.
           Safer? With Homeland
Security SecretaryTomRidge
announcing that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11, is busy in Afghanistan,
plotting a major strike against the US
this year?
           Safer? With baby-faced, 20-year-old
American recruits and 50-year-old American Guardsmen dying in Bush’s war?
           Safer? With our armed forces stretched
so thin that we now have a virtual draft of retired military men and women?
           Maybe the
Bush administration sincerely believed — even before September 11 — that
Saddam Hussein was a threat to the US.
We may never know. The issue is, whether administration officials had any
evidence for that belief — credible, well-documented, thoroughly challenged evidence.
The answer is, No.
           And it
isn’t as though there were no dissenting voices. There was dissent aplenty, and
not just from anti-war activists and the alternative news media. Ted Kennedy,
Al Gore, UN inspector Hans Blix, American intelligence experts outside of the
CIA, officials of other nations were urging caution.
           But the
Bush administration was hell-bent (“beyond hell-bent,” as journalist Bob
Woodward puts it) on going to war against Iraq.
           In his 2002
book Bush at War, a flattering
portrayal of the president, Woodward reports in detail the discussions among
top officials. At 4 p.m. on September 12, 2001 — 31 hours after
the first plane hit the WorldTradeCenter — Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was insisting that the US
should target Iraq,
not just Al Qaeda. Report after report cites the determination of Bush, Cheney,
and others to go to war against Iraq.
           And so we
did. And now, while the Bush administration backpedals on its commitment to
education and to international AIDS efforts, while it cuts funding for
low-income housing, we spend billions of dollars, and lose lives, in a war we
never should have embarked on.
           Now what
was it that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment?
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2004.
