Iraq mess - War reasons unknown

October 12, 2005

TEMPORARY leaders installed in Iraq under the American occupation stole or misused $1 billion — mostly U.S. taxpayer money, we assume — according to warrants issued Monday. This is further proof that President Bush’s needless Iraq war will go down in history as a wasteful blunder.

Last week, Bush made an all-out attempt to regain public support for his war. Addressing the National Endowment for Democracy, he said:
“The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century.” They hope to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.”
America cannot ignore the zealots and merely “hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder.”
If America withdraws now from Iraq, and the new government falls into hands of “holy warriors,” they will use the Mideast nation as a base to spread terrorism to other lands.

All these statements are true. Yet there’s a deep falsity in the president’s pitch:

There were no “Islamic radicals” in Iraq until Bush himself drew them there. Iraq had no connection to terrorism before Bush ordered a U.S. invasion on false grounds. His action turned Iraq into a battleground, pulling fanatics from many places. Now, they pose a worse threat than former dictator Saddam Hussein did.

If Bush had allowed U.N. inspectors to continue policing Iraq, Saddam would have remained a minor local despot. But Bush’s White House clique had been seeking war on Iraq since the 1990s. The 9/11 suicide strike provided a pretext which the White House used to stampede support for the invasion. Fictitious tales of Iraqi horror weapons and Iraqi links to terrorists were fed to the U.S. public. As a result, Congress approved the needless war that has cost nearly 2,000 American lives and $200 billion of taxpayer money.

After Bush’s speech, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said: “The president went into Iraq under a false premise, without a plan, and has totally mismanaged our involvement. Now he is trying to justify his actions with a series of excuses.” Former presidential nominee John Kerry said Bush “continues to invent a false link between the war in Iraq and the tragedy of Sept. 11.”

These responses are accurate. Most Americans now see that Bush’s Iraq invasion was a tragic mistake.

Bush was correct in saying that a small clique of dangerous terrorists dream of creating a “radical Islamic empire.” But he was trying to mislead America again by implying that the menace of those zealots was the reason he started the Iraq war. In truth, Americans still don’t know why he started the war.

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