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Current Topic: Iraq, Part 1

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
--Winston Churchill

The first casualty when war comes is the truth.
--Senator Hiram Johnson

It would be hard to ignore the fact that we’re at war with Iraq; local, national, and international news broadcasts discuss the latest roadside attacks on troops and the latest standoffs with insurgents on a daily basis, newspapers and internet news sites cover hostage-taking events as they happen, and even political cartoons like Doonesbury have taken the day off from making us chuckle to list the names of those who have died in combat. Even if one tried, it would be nearly impossible to escape the news from Iraq.

However, though we are bombarded with news about the latest goings on, some good, but mostly bad, it’s easy to feel as though the war has no effect on our daily lives. If you don’t have a friend or relative that is serving abroad in the military or working as a contractor in the Middle East, it’s easy to pretend that war coverage is just like any fictional dramatic television show—something captivating and gripping while you’re watching it, but easy to forget about once the TV has been turned off because it seemingly has no real impact on our lives. We must not forget about it though; we must not forget about the soldiers that die almost daily, the civilians whose lives are constantly at risk; we must not forget about those who cannot turn the war off with a remote control.

The Run Up To War

It’s unclear exactly when Bush decided that he wanted to go to war with Iraq. There are some that claim that Bush had the idea to oust Saddam Hussein before the 9/11 attacks. Richard Clarke claims that Bush’s first question after 9/11 was “I want you to find whether Iraq did this.” When Clarke said that he, the CIA, and the FBI had already looked into it and found absolutely no connection between the two, Bush replied, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection!” He didn’t want to take no for an answer. Cheney immediately decided that the US needed to bomb Iraq in response. When Clarke told him that al Qaeda was to blame, and that they were based in Afghanistan, Cheney responded that there weren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, that there were plenty of good targets in Iraq. Instead of wanting to go after the people who actually assaulted our land and killed our people, they wanted to attack Iraq; maybe because it was easier, maybe because Bush couldn’t get the supposed “connections” between Iraq and al Qaeda out of his head (though the 9/11 Commission has stated that there are no actual ties between the two, just a few meetings that amounted to nothing), maybe because Bush was determined to finish off what his father started in 1991. Nobody really knows why Bush was so fixated on Iraq.

Iraq was not the happy, peaceful place that Michael Moore made it out to be in Fahrenheit 9/11. However, Iraq was also not a place that harbored terrorists, as George Bush said in the run up to war. Before the United States invaded Iraq, there was virtually no terrorism in the country (save for the terror Saddam Hussein showered on his people, however, Bush repeatedly said in his 2000 campaign that he was not interested in, and the US should not be interested in nation building). So why did we go to war?

Given Reasons for Attack

"...A report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." Bush, in Camp David, September 2002.

The weapons of mass destruction. Unfortunately, the document from the International Atomic Energy Agency (or IAEA, who debunked the yellow cake documents mentioned below) that Bush was discussing as current evidence was from 1996. It was updated in 1998 and 1999, but there was no other updating of the document after that. The IAEA never said that Iraq was making nuclear weapons or was close to making nuclear weapons at any time while George Bush was president. That he represented documents that were as much as six years out of date was deceitful. Bush also made statements about proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could “come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” In October of 2003, the Washington Post reported that Iraq was still in much of the shattered state it had been in after the Gulf War, and that it didn’t have the components needed for a nuclear weapon. That didn’t stop Bush from describing Iraq as a “grave and gathering danger” and Cheney from stating that Iraq was a “mortal threat.”

The administration also trusted the statements of Iraqi defectors about weapons of mass destruction. The majority of the defectors were led out of Iraq by the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmed Chalabi. The majority of their claims were either of no interest or unsubstantiated. The CIA stated that they do not trust Chalabi. He was convicted (in absentia) in Jordan for bank fraud and sentenced to 22 years of hard labor, the State Department raised questions about accounting practices within the Iraqi National Congress, and he has been suspected of spying on the US for Iran. The majority of the defectors claims were not credible, and therefore should not have been included as reasons to go to war.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." –George W. Bush in his January, 2003 State of the Union Address

The uranium could be enriched and used in nuclear weapons – five tons of it would be enough to produce a nuclear bomb –and if it was true that Iraq possessed the uranium (also known as “yellow cake”), it could be very bad news for a country that Iraq’s leader didn’t like – and the United States is one of those countries. However, the Bush White House had been warned for almost a year that the evidence linking Iraq to Niger was not based in fact. Both Iraq and Niger denied the accusation. Iraq’s denial made Bush claim that Hussein “clearly has much to hide.” Then in March, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that the documents that discussed the yellow cake were not authentic—they were “so bad that I” (director general Mohamed ElBaradei) “cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.” The IAEA, after finally getting the documents, determined their inauthenticity in just two hours.

“We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” –President Bush in Cincinnati, October 2002

Actually, the Air Force never believed these statements and wrote a dissent to the president. However, this dissent was kept a secret from Congress, even as the president made his case for war in Fall of 2002. Bush included the assertion about unmanned arial vehicles as he made his case to Congress, though he had been told by those who knew best that Bagdahd did not have the capability to produce such weapons.

Too much has gone on and too much is going on in Iraq to spend just one week of discussion on it. Check back in the next week for the next part of the discussion.