The truths about Iraq that President Bush isn't telling

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0309210495sep21,1,5417527.column?coll=chi-news-col

The stories get stranger by the day
The truths about Iraq that President Bush isn't telling
Steve Chapman
September 21, 2003

After eight years of Bill Clinton and 32 months of George W. Bush, it isn't news when a president dissembles, misleads, deceives, conceals, fudges or lies. News is something out of the ordinary, such as a president telling the truth.

That's why Bush made headlines Thursday when he said something that was known to everyone--well, everyone except 69 percent of the American people. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11," he informed reporters.

As revelations go, this one was about as surprising as learning that Mike Tyson is not the Dalai Lama. But Bush's admission contradicted his own vice president--who earlier in the week had resurrected the tale that one of the hijackers had met with an Iraqi intelligence operative. For some truly inexplicable reason, the administration suddenly developed a fetish about accuracy, and one official after another trooped forward to disown Cheney's claim.

Apparently the vice president violated Bush's strict policy, which is never to say anything bogus outright when you can effectively communicate it through innuendo, implication and the careful sowing of confusion. At a news conference shortly before the campaign in Iraq began, Bush invoked the memory of Sept. 11, 2001, no fewer than eight times. That was enough to foster the widespread impression that we were launching a retaliatory attack, not a pre-emptive one.

But the real scandal is not that the president contrived to frame a poor, innocent dictator. It's that he depicted the invasion as a vital part of the war on terror and continues to do so--even as the evidence accumulates that, from the standpoint of the war on terror, it was about the worst thing we could have done.

Why? Three reasons. First, it diverted attention and resources away from Afghanistan, where we have not quite eliminated the terrorists who attacked us on Sept. 11--notably Osama bin Laden. If anything, the Taliban and Al Qaeda, far from being eradicated, appear to be making a comeback among a population fed up with our ineffectual efforts and short attention span.

Second, our effort went into getting rid of an Iraqi tyrant who was not part of the terrorist threat. As a way to combat terrorism, it made about as much sense as invading Grenada. We had Saddam Hussein in a cage and could have kept him there indefinitely with minimal exertion--allowing us to put all our efforts into hunting down bin Laden's cells throughout the world.

The president never tires of claiming, as he did last week, that "Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties." But "ties" is a mush word that suggests much and proves nothing. I have "ties" to Sammy Sosa because we work for businesses that are owned by the same corporation, Tribune Co. But that doesn't mean he leaves tickets for me at the Will Call window. The administration has yet to show that the flimsy connections it alleges presented a threat to Americans.

The third problem is that instead of putting lots of terrorists in our gunsights, the war served to put lots of Americans in theirs. The administration says that some of the armed resistance in Iraq is coming from Al Qaeda fighters who have sneaked into the country to carry on their jihad. Pentagon officials think they may be getting help from terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which had previously had little interest in killing Americans.

From listening to people in the White House, you would think that embroiling ourselves in a guerrilla war in a once-stable part of the Middle East is a clever trap for our enemies. Those in Iraq today, insists National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, "were not off drinking tea someplace and minding their own business. If they weren't in Iraq, they would be fighting someplace else." Of course, Col. Custer could have said the same thing about the Indians at Little Bighorn.

The only reason existing holy warriors would flock to Iraq is because it offers easier and more numerous U.S. targets than any place they had access to before. Rice neglects to mention that the invasion also has created new terrorists in a variety of places, starting with Iraq itself. Absent the war, many of those people would indeed be off drinking tea someplace--and so would many American soldiers.

Before March 19, when the war began, Iraq offered little hospitality to anti-American terrorists and little threat to American security. Today, it's a vast arena for any fanatics who are willing to risk their lives to spill American blood, some of whom are succeeding. But take it from the administration, that's a good thing.

Honest.