And You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?
So here we are in Iraq. France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Canada and a whole long list of other US allies are not in Iraq. The United Nations is only in Iraq in what most people would admit is a fairly noncommittal way. No Arab or Muslim countries are in Iraq or have offered to go there in force—except Turkey, who is not wanted by Iraqis anywhere south of their northern border. Nor have many of our friends sent us meaningful gifts of money, as they did in our other actions in the region, or even firmly promised any. The unfortunate thing about “unilateral” it seems, is the “uni” part. As in “unique”, as in “unidirectional”, as in “unicycle”. It is the power of “one” theory of the Administration that now becomes such a liability. The time has arrived, one would think, to take a good hard look at how we really got here. But the response from the war’s architects and supporters has been a cacophony of voices saying in effect that it really doesn’t matter. We are at war. We have to stay the course.
It does matter, of course. Unless our most critical foreign policy decisions are henceforth to be based on faith, or worse, to become accidental. In the absence of any credible evidence that Saddam had tons of WMD and was poised to strike the US or our vital interests, we are forced back to the grab bag of reasons put out by the Administration to sooth our minds and silence our dissent before the war. These can be reduced, more or less, to the following list:
1. Saddam had failed to live up to agreements made at the end of the First Gulf War, and was in violation of UN resolutions.
2. Saddam had close ties to terrorists and was connected, even though there was no clear evidence of it, to Al Queda and the attacks of 9/11.
3. Saddam had chemical weapons and weapons-grade biological agents and could be expected to share them freely with terrorists
4. Saddam was close to having nuclear weapons and could be expected to share them freely with terrorists.
5. Saddam was a homicidal maniac who should be removed and his regime destroyed for the good of humanity.
These are the stated reasons for going to war unilaterally in Iraq. Let me say in advance, I do not believe we will find among them the real, overriding reason we invaded Iraq with such urgency and with so little support. Reasons One through Four have already been amply shown to lack validity. However, we constantly hear them reiterated by apologists for the war. Therefore it makes sense to reiterate briefly why they lack validity.
Reason One is largely legalistic. It is similar in its moral force, if not in its magnitude, to the reason why we revoke the freedom of convicts who do not live up to their parole agreements. Saddam made certain promises to the UN at the end of the First Gulf War, and he did not keep them. On May 3, 2002, for instance, Condoleezza Rice explained in an interview with the Indian daily The Hindu:
“As to Iraq, we had a problem with Iraq before September 11 and we have a problem after September 11 and it is that Iraq is in violation of all kinds of agreements that it signed with the international community after its defeat in the war of 1991 . . .”
Other Administration standard bearers echoed her remarks. President Bush and the war hawks at first rejected any need for further UN resolutions before attacking Iraq. What good would they do? According to the Administration, Saddam had scarcely ever complied with any resolutions, so why should we expect him to now? Our allies, much of Congress, and American public opinion, however, showed a preference for “coalition building”, which meant going to the UN. In September of 2002 the Whitehouse published an extensive background paper laying out Saddam’s shortcomings with respect to UN sanctions, and on September 12, the president himself took his case before the UN General Assembly:
“The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble.”
The United States would work with the United Nations; it would rejoin UNESCO, and it would enforce the UN’s past resolutions against Saddam. If need be, it would act alone. Acting alone, however, was nowhere authorized in any UN resolution. Moreover, President Bush did not mention the 90 other UN Security Council resolutions currently being violated by countries other than Iraq, many of them close friends or allies of the US, like Turkey and Pakistan, nor the fact that the US has consistently used its veto to block sanctions against Israel. And it has used its influence to insure that any Security Council resolution unfavorable to Israel be adopted under Chapter VI rather than Chapter VII of the UN Charter, thus vastly limiting the severity of measures to enforce them. Israel is in fact the number one non-compliant nation in the world, currently in violation of over thirty UN resolutions dating from 1969 to as recently as 2002. This has no bearing, of course, on the merits or validity of Iraq’s non-compliance, but it does underscore the purely opportunistic nature of the President’s sudden zeal for using military force in support of UN resolutions.
Reason Number Two, the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, was like a high fast ball-- so tantalizing the hawks just couldn’t lay off of it. Unfortunately for them, however, Saddam and Osama were about as close as Larry Flynt and Pat Robertson. The highjackers of 9/11 were of Saudi and Egyptian origin—not even one Iraqi among them. Most importantly, Saddam had a pretty formidable record of fighting against the very Islamic fundamentalism that Al Qaeda represented. Iraq’s brutal war against Iran, supported and even aided militarily by the US was precisely over this issue. Saddam saw the religious fundamentalism of people like Osama Bin Laden as a threat to his own, very secular regime. Attempts to advance a view of a monolithic Arab terrorist conspiracy would fly in the face of so many such realities that not even the Bush Administration would be able to spin it.
Even as the Whitehouse interwove the War On Terror and the Iraq War into speech after speech, the craftiness of the way they avoided any explicit claim of Iraqi responsibility for 9/11, makes it obvious they lacked any real conviction in a connection. Iraq/Al Qaeda persisted, and still does, most dangerously as a ubiquitous subliminal message like “flag-burning liberals” or “tree-hugging environmentalists”. All you have to do is mention Iraq or Saddam Hussein in conjunction with or in proximity to words like “al-Qaeda”, “terrorism”, “Osama Bin Laden” or “9/11” over and over again in speech after speech and broadcast after broadcast and you will succeed in so blurring the American thinking that a large portion of people in the US when polled will say that Saddam was involved, if not largely responsible for the 9/11 attacks. As an article in London’s The Guardian on Sept., 1, 2003 put it:
“When . . . a large proportion of Americans are reputed to believe that Saddam Hussein was implicated in al-Qaeda terrorism, a belief for which there is not a shred of credible evidence, one wonders if the world's largest democracy is being well served by its media.”
One wonders indeed. In early November 2003 Fox News’ Sean Hannity went to bat once again for the hawks on the Iraq/Al Qaeda matrix idea. A Department of Defense memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee had been leaked to him that seemed, on the face of it, to enumerate a virtual treasure trove of connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, the smoking gun turned out to be loaded with blanks. The DOD immediately jumped on the leak :
“News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate. The items listed in the classified annex were either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA, or, in one case, the DIA. The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions. Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal.”
Fox News dropped the story like a hot potato. Rest assured, however, apologists for the President and the war have not dropped the idea of justifying the invasion in the name of fighting terrorism. As recently as the weekend after Thanksgiving 2003 the US Command in Iraq was announcing (and the stateside broadcast outlets were dutifully trumpeting) the arrest of three members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Although the broadcasters made no generalizations about the arrests, the tone of the reporting was ominous and pregnant with meaning. Undoubtedly the Ministry of Truth will soon seize upon this as definitive evidence that Saddam Hussein was a charter member of Al Qaeda and among the key planners of the attacks of 9/11. The fact that the trio of terrorists were found in Iraq more than two years after the attacks at a time when Muslim Jihadists from all over the region are pouring into the country in hopes of a chance to strike a blow in the target-rich environment of the American occupation will not unduly trouble commentators for whom the Saddam/Al Qaeda connection is both ideologically satisfying and politically correct.
Reasons Three and Four are different, but parts of a single package: Iraq had vast stores of chemical and possibly biological weapons and would soon have nuclear capabilities as well. These were not idle claims. The Clinton Administration had come to more or less similar conclusions. Saddam’s evasiveness and downright hostility to the inspections was presumed by all to indicate guilt. When the UN inspectors were thrown out of Iran in 1998, the opacity of Iraqi weapons programs became once again complete. CIA analysis became heavily dependent on exiles and defectors and was widely divided. Inspections seemed to indicate that WMD programs had been largely dismantled, and many of the stockpiles of chemical weapons would in any case have long since passed their normal shelf lives. The word from those who fled Iraq, however, seemed to deny this. Which was true? The CIA found itself flying blind. Satellite surveillance and electronic monitoring were of little help. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, and with the Bush Administration beating the drums ever louder for an invasion of Iraq, the agency began to provide analysis that at least encompassed an increasingly darker side. The question inevitably arose: Was the intelligence was guiding the Administration or was the Administration guiding the intelligence?