Think Again: We Are No Safer
by Eric Alterman
December 18, 2003
<a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=15070">http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=15070</a>
Eric Alterman
Saturday, December 13 was a great day for justice. The murderous dictator
and mass murderer, Saddam Hussein, was caught by U.S. forces and will be
tried for his myriad crimes. But contrary to the enormous media hype the
administration has enjoyed, those who say we are no safer for Hussein's
capture are correct.
America was never threatened by Iraq. Every single one of the scare tactics
employed by the administration in their game of bait and switch, designed to
exploit the trauma of 9/11 to deploy the neoconsı longtime plan to invade
Iraq, has proven an exaggeration, a chimera or a lie. There were no WMDs, no
nukes, and no connections to Al Qaeda. Indeed, Saddam was being effectively
contained at the moment George Bush chose to plunge the region into war and
the inspectors were hard at work, despite the presidentıs clueless claims to
the contrary. (³Did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer
is: ŒAbsolutely.ı And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and
he wouldn't let them in.²)
Of course these simple but rather significant complications appear to have
eluded much of the media, to the delight of Karl Rove and the administration
spin-meisters. Dan Rather offered up the storyline of the day on Sunday when
he opined,² "This is a tremendous boost for the reelection prospects of
President Bush." And indeed, immediate polling demonstrated an up tick for
the president. John Harwood and Jacob M. Schlesinger observed in a Wall
Street Journal news story that Democrats were ³instantly losing ground in
their quest to discredit Mr. Bush's Iraq policy."
But just how does Husseinıs capture justify Bushıs Iraq policy? That policy
is still a failure, based on the administrationıs unwillingness to plan for
anything but divine intervention on behalf of the neoconservative critique.
A day after Husseinıs capture, two car bombs went off and killed six Iraqi
policemen, while wounding twenty more, as an American soldier was killed on
Sunday by a roadside bomb near Baghdad. On the day of the capture, a car
bomb exploded in Khaldiya, killing 17 police officers. (Didnıt anyone tell
these guys we won the war?) The attacks increased in intensity in the
following days. Ibrahim Mutlak, director of police patrols for Salahadin
Province (where Tikrit is located), told the Timesı James Risen to expect
the guerrilla war to worsen as a result of the capture. ³Lots of people did
not want to join the resistance because they did not want to be called
Saddam supporters,² he explained. ³But now all the people who oppose the
Americans will join."
Meanwhile, this was supposed to be a war against ³terrorism,² remember?
Hussein was a horrible guy, but try as it might, the administration has
never demonstrated any connection between the Iraqi and any significant
anti-U.S. terrorist organization, much less Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda,
our ostensible enemies in this fight.
It is easy to forget that the entire effort in Iraq was always couched in
terms of a response to 9/11. Just recently, Condoleezza Rice made the
original argument that we needed to go to war because Hussein posed a threat
in "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged." And Paul Wolfowitz was
proved no less ingenuous. "We know [Iraq] had a great deal to do with
terrorism in general and with Al Qaeda in particular, and we know a great
many of [Osama] bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organize in
cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime," he told ABC on the
second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
President Bush also tried, consistently, to create the impression of a link
between the forces of Hussein and Al Qaeda. In March 2003, he claimed, "If
the world fails to confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime, refusing
to use force, even as a last resort, free nations would assume immense and
unacceptable risks. The attacks of September the 11th, 2001, showed what the
enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what
terrorists or terrorist states could do with weapons of mass destruction."
Later on, he announced, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on
terror that began on September the 11, 2001 - and still goes on. That
terrible morning, 19 evil men - the shock troops of a hateful ideology -
gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions." Bush
also added, "The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign
against terror. We've removed an ally of Al Qaeda, and cut off a source of
terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain
weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no
more. In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been
focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense. We have not
forgotten the victims of September the 11th - the last phone calls, the cold
murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the
terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war
is what they got." In fact, ³they" (in the persons of Osama bin Laden and
his top lieutenants) not only got away, but they continue to taunt Bush from
their hideaways - most recently on September 11, 2003, in a videotape
broadcast by Al Jazeera.
According to a secret 2002 report by US intelligence agencies, quoted by NY
Times reporter James Risen, Al Qaedaıs leadership ³viewed the Iraqis,
particularly the military and security services, as corrupt, irreligious and
hypocritical in that they succumb to Western vices while concurrently
remaining at war with the United States.² The report - which was based on
the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, one of the highest-ranking Qaeda leaders
in American custody - goes on to say, "the Iraqis were not viewed as true
jihadists, and there was doubt amongst the senior Al Qaeda leadership on the
depth of Saddamıs commitment to destroy Israel and further the cause of
cleansing the Holy Land of infidel influences or presence.²
At work here is one of the presidentıs favorite rhetorical tactics, which
Joshua Micah Marshall terms ³the confidently expressed, but currently
undisprovable assertion.² Bush took the country to war with Iraq on the
basis of grounds that turned out to be patently false ‹ and understood by
most experts at the time to be so - but could not be disproved without an
invasion.
Much the same goes for Bushıs program for budget-busting tax cuts for the
wealthiest few. Almost no one with even a college degree in economics really
expects them to offer a cure for the myriad problems that ail the economy.
In many respects, they are the problem itself. But all of this is impossible
to say for certain without knowing the future. Bush, meanwhile, speaks as if
the future will fall into line with his beliefs once it recognizes his
personal resolve. It is much the same across the board. Abstinence education
will end teenage pregnancy. Oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness will end
our energy problems. Unilateral action across the world will lead other
nations eventually to follow in our path. Anyone with any remotely objective
expertise in these areas knows such beliefs to be akin to believing in Peter
Pan. ³The President and his advisors,² concluded a New York Times editorial,
³obviously believe that the constant repetition of several simplistic points
will hypnotize the American people into forgetting the original question.²
In the meantime, the true perpetrators of 9/11 remain alive and well. We
have more than 10 times as many troops in Iraq as in border regions of
Afghanistan and Pakistan where bin Laden is believed to be operating. And
here at home, we are hardly better prepared than we were last time. Our
nuclear and chemical plants remain all but unprotected; so too our ports and
infrastructure. Our first responders are untrained and our cities starved
for resources to defend themselves.
Sounds like a story to me...
Eric Alterman is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
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Received on Sat Dec 20 08:58:13 2003
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