The real reason Bush invaded Iraq when he did
by mikepridmore
Thu Oct 7th, 2004 at 19:53:20 GMT
Simply put, George Bush invaded Iraq when he did because he realized his case for war was about to fall apart. The UN resolution Mr. Bush originally said he wanted to enforce called for Saddam to disarm and to submit to inspections to verify that he had disarmed. (pdf link here) Once Saddam submitted to inspections, the onus fell on Bush to either prove that Saddam had not disarmed or to step back and allow the inspections to continue.
In what was perhaps an honest effort to show that Saddam had not disarmed, the Bush administration relayed intelligence (much of it from questionable sources) to the weapons inspectors. Not even one significant piece of this intelligence turned out to be true. NOTHING significant. Nada. Zip. Zilch. A big ZERO. Verification of this from February 2003 can be found here. The same link, from a month before the war started, confirms the report in the NY Times (link) that serious questions were already being raised about the aluminum tubes the Bush administration insisted were for building nuclear weapons.
Mr. Bush was failing to make his case. As weapons inspectors traveled the length and breadth of Iraq and continued to find no confirmation of WMDs (link), the case became weaker with each passing day. Not happy with the options left to him (prove your case or step back and let the inspections continue), George Bush decided to cheat the system. He decided to muddy the water by brazenly claiming (in spite of the mounting evidence) that it was obvious Saddam had not disarmed and to quickly invade before the world had time to think about it and call him on the deception.
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Mr. Bush came to office with the perception that Saddam was a bad man and that he needed to be removed by whatever means necessary. That is basically what Paul O'Neill said (link):
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," says O'Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.
Even some neoconservatives have said that the the main purpose of the war was simply to get rid of Saddam Hussein (link):
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
After 9/11, Mr. Bush thought he had found the excuse he had been waiting for. He decided to somehow blame Saddam for 9/11. He immediately insisted to the FBI, CIA, counter-terrorism specialists and others that they had to find a connection between Saddam and 9/11. (link) He had already set up an Office of Special Plans outside the official system to gather intelligence about Saddam and after 9/11, while the CIA and others focused on Afghanistan and bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith went into overdrive to make a connection between Saddam and 9/11. (link) The Bush administration also started a carefully crafted public disinformation campaign with the result that over 40% of the American populace still thinks there is a connection between Saddam and 9/11. (link)
So intent was Mr. Bush on taking down Saddam Hussein that by October 2002, when he was talking to the UN about its demands that Saddam disarm and promising the US congress that if they would grant him the authority to go to war he would go to war only as a last resort, he had already been making specific military preparations and adjustments for at least eight months. (link) EIGHT MONTHS!!!!! Secretly diverting funds and manpower and equipment at least eight months before asking for permission is not the mark of a president who wants to avoid war.
Today the WaPo editorial board seems to be saying that George Bush made the right choice to take Saddam out preemptively, even if it meant deceiving the American people and the world about the rationale for the war, because the inspections and sanctions would have failed to contain Saddam. No they don't come right out and say that but it is clear enough to discern (link):
What can't be known is what would have happened had Mr. Bush chosen not to invade. Here the new report suggests some answers. Saddam Hussein, it says, was focused on ending international sanctions, which were crumbling before the crisis began. Had he succeeded, he would have resumed production of chemical weapons and probably a nuclear program as well. Mr. Kerry suggested recently that Saddam Hussein's regime would have collapsed under the inspectors' pressure. That is one possibility; another is that it would have reemerged as a significant power in the Middle East, and as a de facto or real ally of the Islamic extremist forces with which the United States is at war.
Just for the record, here (from elsewhere in WaPo) is what the report said:
But after extensive interviews with Hussein and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped save the regime multiple times," the report said.
Hussein, the report concluded, "aspired to develop a nuclear capability" and intended to work on rebuilding chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift sanctions. But the report also notes: "The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.
Duelfer said one of Hussein's main strategic goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had devastated the country's economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.
As piece after piece of Mr. Bush's rationale for war is proven false, it becomes more and more obvious that there was a reason other than the ones given for going to war when we did. Perhaps Mr. Bush really thought that Saddam was too dangerous to be left to the UN to deal with and that the ends (taking Saddam out of power) justified the means (misleading the world about what Saddam was doing). If that was Mr. Bush's line of reasoning (and such increasingly appears to be the case) he failed to take into account the impact of the Iraq War on terrorist's ability to recruit (it seems to have helped them), US credibility in the world (perhaps still feared but no longer trusted), and numerous other issues.
Yes, Saddam wanted to erode international support for and illegally bypass sanctions and he probably hoped to revive his WMD program at some point. Since we now know Saddam had no WMDs, the sanctions were evidently working pretty well and it would have been hard to restart a WMD program as long as weapons inspectors were traveling the length and breadth of the country looking wherever they wanted whenever they wanted to do so.
Up until the day we invaded we had Saddam where he needed to be. There was international support for sanctions and weapons inspectors were indeed making it impossible for Saddam to restart a WMD program. What we needed from Mr. Bush (to keep Saddam under control) was patience and vigilance. Instead we got impatience and a form of vigilanteism. And due to Mr. Bush's bad decisions we are now less safe not more so.
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