As the controversy escalates over George W. Bush's 16-word miscalculation, during his 2003 State-of-the-Union address, those of us involved in the Anti-War Movement are asking why the debate didn't begin earlier.
Three months after the fall of Baghdad, nearly 150,000 U.S. soldiers are struggling to quell the violence and looting, restore water and electricity, and repair the war-torn region's economy and infrastructure while the newly-liberated Iraqis, including war lords and mullahs, move to establish democracy under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam. All the while, casualties continue to mount.
As the Bush Administration attempts to dispel fears that we are now fully-engaged in a guerilla war, the President is waxing sophomoric: "bring 'em on," he taunted the Iraqi resistance, last week. The following day, 20 soldiers were wounded in attacks across Iraq.
The Administration's justification for a preemptive war against Saddam's regime was explicitly that America was under imminent threat of attack by WMD. Many in Congress, as well as many Americans who were initially against the war, gave their full support to the President as a result of his repeated claims. As it turned out, the regime was barely able to defend itself and collapsed in three weeks.
The White House now states that the invasion was warranted because Saddam was a bad guy. Since most world leaders are guilty of something, by waiting to determine the reason for war after the fact, virtually any war can be justified. So, is this what we can expect in the future?
Bush's State-of-the Union address, vetted and tweaked dozens of times during its laborious development, also included dubious references to mobile-biological weapons labs, high-strength aluminum tubes for nuclear-weapons production, vast supplies of chemical and biological compounds and a direct connection to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The line currently in question, attributed to British intelligence, concerned the two most feared words in the English language-- nuclear weapons.
Other Administration hawks drew their verbal swords as well and, with the exception of Secretary-of-State Powell, maintained that Iraq was developing nukes. Yet, once the facts were called into question, CIA Director George Tenet, a noted critic of the Iraq/Niger uranium connection, fell on his sword. British Prime Minister Blair still stands by his intelligence sources.
Recently, the Republican-led Senate rejected establishing a bipartisan commission to investigate prewar data and, earlier, the President stalled an investigation into 9/11.
There were more than a few among us who feared, all along, that George W. Bush's inability to comprehend complexity and analyze information could be problematic. We feared that his trickle-down economics, which cut taxes for the wealthy, would devour our healthy surplus and put the economy back into deficit. We feared that his naïve foreign affairs policies would isolate us from the rest of the world and that his dismal environmental record as Governor of Texas would trickle-up and foul the entire country. But only a few among us ever imagined a scenario such as the one that enfolded on September 11, and the chain of events which would follow.
America was embraced by the world after the terrorist attacks, but the Administration's rush to judgement and arrogant disregard of our allies, put us at odds with the international community. While we waged war against Iraq, al-Qaeda made its escape. And, as Baghdad was relentlessly bombed during the Shock and Awe campaign, live network coverage aired the Stock Market rising with each terrible blast.
Now, in the biggest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, following World War II, American companies, lured by Iraqi oil revenue, are preparing to rebuild. The prime contracts, doled out to many White House-linked corporations, are necessary because of what the Bush Administration calls "security considerations."
This murky new world of classified intelligence, combined with the age-old inner workings of power, are making it almost impossible for the ordinary citizens of this admired and envied democracy to make heads or tails of the truth.
Maybe the White House, at the time of the President's State-of-the-Union address, was not aware that one of their key pieces of information was based on forged documents, even though, nearly a year earlier, a top former U.S. diplomat had reported it to Vice President Cheney's office.
Maybe, one day, WMD will mysteriously turn up somewhere in deepest, darkest Iraq.
Maybe the next recorded message from Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein will be a death-bed confession linking the two together in contradictory kinship.
But this Administration's insistence to have the world bend to its will, while concealing information from its citizenry, diverting examination of its policies and blaming its critics for the results may have further unintended consequences for them on election day, 2004.
Greenwich Citizen: July, 2003