Reconsidering the President’s script for war in Iraq

It’s been said the first casualty of war is truth. With the Bush administration’s show of… It’s been said the first casualty of war is truth. With the Bush administration’s show of token diplomacy having reached its predetermined conclusion and war a virtual certainty, now might be a good time for an autopsy. Knowing how the truth of this war was replaced by the bright and blinding lie might make us all a little wiser, and a little less likely to be fooled again.

The fundamental lie of this campaign is that it is merely an extension of the interminable War on Terror. We are meant to believe that invading Iraq has a reasonable connection to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that our leaders only awoke to Saddam Hussein’s simmering threat in wake of that tragedy. Yet in 1998, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – then in the employ of a conservative think-tank – along with Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others, wrote a letter urging President Clinton to depose Hussein, without United Nations backing if necessary.

The familiar argument of Iraq’s imminent acquisition of weapons of mass destruction was being used five years ago and, as today, military action was seen as the only viable solution. Interestingly enough, the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz letter specifically mentions the “hazard” posed to “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.”

While Clinton attempted to deal with al Qaeda, the future defense secretary was already calling for regime change as the “aim of American foreign policy.” In October of that same year, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, a blueprint for toppling Hussein and establishing “a program to support a transition to democracy in Iraq,” essentially vindicating Rumsfeld’s position.

History tends to devour these little tidbits, and the second time around the same arguments – cynically sanctified by 3,000 dead – take on the color of a moral crusade. You could call it prescient if it weren’t so clearly a case of opportunism.

And what of those weapons of mass destruction? If the threat were so imminent five, even 10 years ago, surely it has only grown more dire since. Yet the CIA documents purporting to show Iraq’s attempt to buy uranium from an African nation were recently revealed as forgeries. The Bush administration’s response? The threat is real even if the evidence is not. Ditto the dual-use materials said to be part of Hussein’s nuclear development plan – they have little to no value in nuke research. Those banned pipes would, however, allow Iraqis to make much needed sanitation repairs in order to curb disease outbreaks.

A group of former CIA officers has accused the administration of cooking the intelligence books to support their case, and given George Tenet’s remarkable – not to say unbelievable – conversion to the cult of the righteous war, it’s hard not to wonder what’s going on behind those many closed doors. The Los Angeles Times reported Friday on a classified State Department report undermining the latest rationale behind Invasion Iraq: it will foster democracy in the region. Even the State Department isn’t convinced by the official line. We seem to be running out of reasons to go to war faster than we can make up new ones.

Luckily for hawks, there’s always the al Qaeda connection to fall back on. OK, so maybe we’ve wanted to get rid of Hussein for a long time, and maybe oil does have something to do with it, and maybe the nuclear threat isn’t as dire as we led you to believe, but Osama and Saddam are bosom buddies in terror, the hawks say.

Putting aside for a moment the implicit racism underlying this tact and its slyly taking advantage of American ignorance in believing a militant Islamic would team up with a secular despot in a tag-team of terror, let’s go to the tape. Remember in early February, just after Colin Powell had delivered his case for war to the United Nations, complete with a pack of distortions criticized by U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix. Powell was jumping at shadows, seeing enlarged runways for missile launches where there were none, mistaking health department trucks for biotoxin delivery vehicles and citing previously cleared facilities as suspect. Then came the newest bin Laden tape, which the administration hailed as proving the al Qaeda-Iraq link.

The only snag in the analysis was the voice on the tape actually denounced Hussein and his Ba’ath cronies thusly: “the Socialists are infidels wherever they are, either in Baghdad or Aden.” The tape also declares Hussein’s blood “halal” – the term used to indicate one whose killing is permissible. This is nothing new, as bin Laden has denounced Iraq’s regime since 1996.

The public relations war fought in America during the past several months is a case study in sowing confusion – confusion as to who our enemies really are, their capabilities, how anxious we should be and where we go from here. It is the subversion of democracy to the rule of the demagogue, depending on a misinformed populace blinded by grief and rage. Though war now seems as inevitable as a freight train, there is still a lesson in that pre-war time, a lesson in when to be skeptical of those in power.

Jesse Hicks is a columnist for The Pitt News. He may be reached at jhicks@pittnews.com.