Trust fades as war cry rings too hollow
February 10, 2004
BY MARY MITCHELL SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
suntimes.com
President Bush's appearance on "Meet the Press" on Sunday was the last straw. For months, I've been hoping that the cache of weapons would actually turn up. For months, I've suffered cruel jokes about me trusting a Bush. And for months, I've watched the rationale for the war on Iraq shift from one that I could digest to one that makes me want to throw up.
Now I feel betrayed.
Not because I am a Republican. I am not. Not even because I couldn't join those who danced around their TV sets Sunday shouting: "I told you so." I feel betrayed because I am an American who wants to believe that America is not the big-footed bully that so many people outside of the United States claim it is.
I still believe that when confronted with right and wrong, moral leaders choose to do the right thing.
The capture of Saddam Hussein gave me a sliver of hope. Surely, if we could find one man hiding in a hole, we could find a stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. But that hope faded on Sunday.
While President Bush reiterated that he "expected there to be stockpiles of weapons," he also tweaked his language about the threat, and ended up looking more like a man covering his behind than the leader of a superpower.
"If I might remind you, that in my language I called it 'a grave and gathering threat,'" Bush told Tim Russert. "There was no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a danger to America. No doubt."
War cry unmasked
It is that kind of wishy-washy talk that belies the reality of Bush's war cry.
The Bush administration consistently argued that America had to go to war because Iraq posed a threat on two fronts: The Iraqi government was supporting al-Qaida terrorists, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in defiance of the United Nations' order banning it from manufacturing such weapons.
When you strip away all the other rhetoric -- including Bush's passionate words after 9/11 when he vowed to launch a war on terrorism; put aside the Iraqi dictator's abuse of his own people, and the ongoing battles in the Middle East; it is fair to boil down the war we are engaged in to the weapons argument.
It was the fear that Iraqi terrorists were waiting to use these weapons on Americans that netted Bush support for this war. That is why so many mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, buried their anti-war sentiments, said their prayers and sacrificed their sons and daughters to a just war.
I have no doubt that the Bush administration's fear-mongering made many of us reluctant warriors.
Now we are hearing a different story from the Bush camp.
Saddam Hussein was a danger -- not because he actually had weapons of mass destruction -- but because he had the capacity to have a weapon.
"We thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon, and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network," Bush said on Sunday.
When raids go bad
I won't pretend to know anything about the CIA other than what we have all read or heard in the news. But without the weapons, how can the president justify killing the sons of a sovereign leader and chasing that leader into a hole based on expectations?
I listened to Bush on Sunday and thought about Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the Black Panther leaders who were gunned down in their West Side apartments during a police raid in 1969.
At the time, the armed Black Panther Party was considered by police authorities as posing the most dangerous threat to Americans. In fact, then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the group "the most dangerous and violence-prone of all extremist groups."
Police officers had gone to the apartment looking for weapons, under the direction of then-Cook County State's Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan. The police fired nearly 100 shots into the apartment, compared to a single shot fired by Clark. But the overwhelming police firepower wasn't initially admitted.
Instead, Hanrahan insisted police officers were engaged in a violent confrontation with the Panthers. He went so far as to have the raid re-enacted for a WBBM-Channel 2 newscast. A Chicago Sun-Times reporter showed that the bullet holes allegedly made by the Black Panthers were actually heads of nails, which further fueled the controversy.
An FBI investigation later proved that it was the police -- not the Black Panthers -- who did almost all of the shooting, and Hanrahan and several of the police officers involved in the raid were indicted for obstructing justice. Although the men were acquitted, the deadly raid gave rise to an enduring distrust of police by many of the city's citizens.
That's what I'm feeling right now -- distrust and real fear.
Because a war that is based on wrong is a war that can't be won. |
