The real reason we went to war
It wasn't WMDs, it was about teaching our enemies a lesson. But in a democracy, leaders shouldn't lie about issues of life and death.
By Gary Kamiya
June 10, 2003 | The decision to go to war is the most momentous one a leader can make. National security, relations with the rest of the world, vast sums of money and the lives of troops and civilians are all at stake. Intentionally misleading one's country about why a war is necessary is perhaps the gravest offense a president can commit -- an act of betrayal that potentially warrants removal from office, and could even be considered treasonous.
If it turns out that the reasons the United States gave for invading Iraq were false, and the Bush administration knew they were false, it should be held fully accountable by the American people and their representatives in Congress. If President Nixon could be forced from office because of his coverup of a politically motivated burglary and President Clinton impeached because an obsessed prosecutor investigating a bogus real-estate scandal came upon a sexual impropriety, a president found to have lied about or distorted the reasons for going to war surely deserves to face at least similar sanctions.
We gave one and only one reason for invading Iraq: self-defense. The Bush administration unequivocally told the American people that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction, was linked to al-Qaida, and thus posed an imminent and unacceptable threat to America and the world. In his address to the nation on March 17, 2003, just days before U.S. forces attacked Iraq, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." In the days before the invasion, Bush began to raise the issue of Saddam's murderous reign, but -- despite the disingenuous title given to the campaign, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- we did not bomb Baghdad to defend human rights. Just ask the suffering people of the Congo, with its over 3 million dead, how much the Bush administration cares about their right to life.
To this date, two months after Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown, no evidence has been found that Iraq possessed any weapons of mass destruction. One smoking gun after the next has turned out to be a fraud, or grossly overhyped. The latest example is the two mysterious trailers: Immediately after the trailers were discovered, administration authorities asserted that they were biological weapons labs, but on Saturday intelligence analysts who had examined the trailers disputed that claim, telling the New York Times they were probably used for other purposes and that "the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment."
Far more disturbing than these desperate attempts to find WMDs under every bush is the fact that it is now clear to everyone (except, apparently, the Democratic candidates for president) that the Bush administration put its thumb heavily on the scales when presenting the evidence it used to justify war. The Times reported months ago that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top lieutenant, Paul Wolfowitz, had pressured the CIA to come up with evidence that would justify an invasion, going so far as to create a special Pentagon intelligence unit to get "better" results. That ominous revelation was largely ignored by a press corps apparently too stunned by 9/11 to question anything the White House might choose to do so long as it fell under the rubric of "national security."
Since then, evidence has emerged that the administration cherry-picked only the most ominous parts of intelligence reports, downplaying or completely ignoring those that took a less alarming view. Friday, for example, it was reported that the Pentagon's main intelligence agency warned just five months before we went to war that there was "no definitive, reliable information" that Iraq was producing or stockpiling chemical or biological weapons. This was a crucial piece of intelligence that cut to the heart of the reason we went to war -- a war that has cost more than 100 American lives, with more troops being killed every week. Yet no administration official -- not Bush, not Vice President Dick Cheney, not Powell, not Rumsfeld -- saw fit to share this crucial piece of information with the American people.
Then, of course, there is the specious connection between Iraq and al-Qaida asserted with increasing certainty by Bush. That supposed connection was known by all with even a passing knowledge of the subject to be virtually nonexistent. But Bush kept asserting it, and in the end his assertion of frightening links between al-Qaida and Saddam played a significant role in convincing the American people a war against Iraq was necessary. In fact, when he was warning the American people of those ties, Bush presumably knew that Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida leader captured in March 2002, had told the CIA that his organization had no ties with Saddam.
So angry are many members of the intelligence community about what they regard as egregious interference from the administration -- from pressure to come up with the "right" answers to tendentious misinterpretation of their data -- that they have begun venting to journalists, charging that the White House lied to the public.
It is true, of course, that the United States was not alone in suspecting that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Before he was forced off his job by the U.S. invasion, U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix raised serious questions about Iraq's WMDs, saying that various deadly weapons and agents, including anthrax, VX and chemical bombs, remained unaccounted for. And since Saddam is known to have had WMDs, and to have used them on his own people as well as against Iran, it would not be an outrageous stretch to presume -- as U.S. officials, though not Blix, did -- that if he was unable to prove he had destroyed them, he still had them.
Moreover, those who deny that Saddam possessed WMDs are forced to address a peculiar question: If he didn't have them, why didn't he simply prove to the U.N. he didn't have them, thus potentially averting an invasion?
Neither of these arguments, however, address the central issue: Did American leaders fail to lay out all the evidence about the Saddam threat to the American people? Bush and Rumsfeld may have sincerely believed the Iraq dictator had weapons of mass destruction; they may have had some legitimate reasons to fear that he did. (Saddam's failure to prove he destroyed his WMDs may remain a permanent mystery. But it could be explained by the fact that his terrified underlings lied to him, assuring him that a nonexistent program was in full swing.) But the point is this: In a democracy, mere beliefs, no matter how sincere, are not sufficient to justify national leaders suppressing or distorting evidence before going to war. Not even in times of national crisis. In fact, particularly not in times of national crisis. |
