The Soap Box

In the re-election race of his life, Republican Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio let the cat out of the bag this morning on Meet the Press. According to Senator DeWine, we’re in Iraq for us, not for the Iraqis. Acting as though this is common knowledge, Senator DeWine appeared not to even notice that he single-handedly put the final nail in the coffin of President Bush’s Iraq policy. Luckily for him, the rest of the nation is not likely to notice either.

A quick review is in order. The Bush administration bombed its way into Iraq for three main reasons: First, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and therefore posed a “grave and gathering” threat to the U.S.; Second, the Iraqi regime was connected to the attacks of September 11th and al Qaeda, and might even transfer some of these weapons to “the terrorists” leading to a mushroom cloud over New York City; Third, Saddam Hussein had used these weapons of mass destruction against his own people who need to be liberated from a regime with no respect for human rights.

One by one, each justification for the most costly American war since Vietnam — in terms of dollars and human lives — fell by the wayside and the administration, never detered, simply shifted focus to the next justification on the list. A thorough search of Iraq (to say the least) failed to turn up a single shred of evidence that Iraq had any active unconventional weapons programs operating at the time of the invasion. We now know that Vice President Cheney himself personally made sure that our intelligence agencies were following every lead and overturning every rock. Still nothing. It took the administration many more months than it did David Kay, their chief weapon’s hunter, to bring themselves to admit that there were no weapons, but finally the adminstration, too, gave up on this argument. House Majority Leader John Boehner and Senator Rick Santorum are now the two last remaining people in the country who continue to keep their fingers cross that something will turn up one of these days.

No matter. “At the time, everyone believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction,” the Republicans say and move on to the next justification. (N.B. “everyone” doesn’t include Joe Wilson, Mohammad El-Baradei, Hans Blix, Colin Powell, the French, the Germans, the Russians, probably George “slam dunk” Tenet, and half of the American people, and “believed” means that, on-balance, the cherry-picked intelligence outweighed the contradictory intelligence which was suppressed and, where it somehow made its way through the process, was completely ignored.) Unfortunately, Iraq’s connection to September 11th was a short-lived justification for the war. Affective during the intitial sales pitch, once the drums of war stopped beating, the American people managed to hear through the din the voices of all rational people who quickly debunked the “evidence” that Iraq officials had had operational meetings with and harbored al Qaeda operatives. The 9/11 Commission finally laid to rest the notion that there was any operational relationship at all between Iraq and al Qaeda.

But the connection between the Iraq War and the War on Terrorism continued to offer the administration some cover for some time more. “We’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here,” was the guiding mantra. Sadly, this is perhaps the one true statement on the war that has come out of this administration. Although before the invasion Iraq was virtually devoid of any militants who posed a true risk to our national security, today the coutry is rife with them, and the risk they pose is mainly to our troops stationed within the country. Remove the troops, remove the threat. Substantially, but not entirely. Iraq is virtually doomed to become the next Afghanistan, a failed state which offers an effective home base to al Qaeda, and that does pose a true threat to our security even after the troops have gone.

Unfortunately, our fight in Iraq only postpones this outcome, at best.
It is true that we are fighting “them” over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here. Much of al Qaeda’s focus — if an ill-defined, decentralized world-wide movement can have a focus — has been shifted to finishing the process of destabilizing Iraq which we initiated with our invasion. This, of course, could never be a justification for the invasion itself, unless the administration was prescient enough to have calculated that after the invasion there would be a major insurgency which would draw “the terrorists” into the country where we could confront them. We know for sure that’s not the case. So the White House apparently made the grotesque calculation that it is desireable to condemn 100 innocent Iraqis (and various numbers of American soldiers) to death each day to ensure that 3,000 Americans won’t die in the next many years to come that it will take al Qaeda to be able to plan and execute another September 11th-scale attack. Gives one a sense of just how much an innocent Arab life is worth to the White House when compared to an American life.

Fortunately, neither is this justification withstanding the test of time. Currently, the majority of Americans do not see the War in Iraq as connected to the War on Terrorism, perhaps because it’s doing nothing to help Iraq avoid its fate of becoming a failed state which harbors terrorists. This is fortunate because in addition to being merely an after-the-fact rationalization of the initial invasion, fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here isn’t even working. The President cites the fact that there have been no further attacks on American soil as evidence that his strategy is working. However, correlation does not equal causation. The only previous al Qaeda attack on American soil, the attack against the World Trade Center in 1993, came eight years before September 11th. By that measure, Mr. Bush won’t even be in office any longer when the time comes that he can legitimately claim to be keeping the homeland safe.

Much worse, claiming that this strategy has been effective ignores the many major terrorist attacks that have been successfully carried out around the world since the War in Iraq began. The war has failed to keep the people of London or Madrid safe. Worldwide, the number of terrorist attacks have only increased since the war began, and the intelligence services now tell us that the War in Iraq has officially made us less safe. A lack of attacks on American soil is no evidence that our fight in Iraq has impeded “the terrorists’” ability to strike where they wish. As with much of this administration’s foreign policy, what dogs their attempt at selling their rosey version of events is much less their wrong-headed policy as the incompetence with which they attempt to carry it out.

This all left a single remaining justification for the War in Iraq: liberating the good people of that nation. For the entire length of the war so far, President Bush has always taken great pains to point out that the United States is in Iraq to liberate it, not to occupy it. As the Iraqi’s stand up, we will stand down, he has always said. If the Iraqis ask us to leave, we will leave. Perhaps it was due to our complete lack of control over the country that there was never any serious suspicion among the American people that our role in Iraq was as an occupier (incompetence saves the day again). That has, of late, begun to change.

More and more Americans are beginning to believe that we aren’t standing down as the Iraqis stand up, or at least that the Iraqis aren’t standing up and we’re not trying too hard to get them to. Certainly more and more Iraqis are beginning to wish the Americans would leave their country, now a solid majority. Despite that clear majority, it appears that the President will insist that he hear it from the loyalist Iraqi leadership before he believes that the Iraqis are asking us to leave (just like requests for more troops have to come from the top generals in charge, hand-picked by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for their unwillingness to make waves, before he’ll send more troops).

Nevertheless, things still seem to be holding together on the notion that we’re fighting to give the Iraqis a stable, free nation. Then comes Senator DeWine and blurts out the fact that we’re in Iraq for ourselves, not for the Iraqis. The only important objective left in Iraq is the safety of the United States. “Step down when they step up? We’ll leave if they ask us to? Don’t think so.” Now that sounds like occupier talk.

To recap, no weapons of mass destruction, no connection to “the terrorists,” and no liberating here. What’s the truth, Mr. President? What is the real justification for the War in Iraq? “We invaded Iraq to protect the innocent Iraqis from an evil communist — er, terrorist regime which had the potential to spread the communist — er, terrorist threat throughout the world which would jeopardize our national security. We will win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese — er, Iraqi people when we liberate their country from the enemy and hand them a stable, democratic nation tied up neatly in a bow.”

Senator DeWine inadvertently confirmed for the nation the true reason we now find ourselves bogged down in Iraq: because we’ve forgotten why we lost the last one we got bogged down in.