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Why Saddam was doomed, WMDs or
not
By Jason Leopold
While
the hawks in the Bush administration attempt to justify
the logic behind a preemptive strike against Iraq as the
likelihood of finding the country’s alleged weapons of
mass destruction grows increasingly remote, the truth
behind the war is finally coming to light.
In
his State of the Union address in January, President
George W Bush said intelligence reports from the CIA and
the FBI indicated that Saddam Hussein “had the materials
to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX
nerve agent”, which put the United States in imminent
danger of possibly being attacked sometime in the
future.
Two months later, despite no concrete
evidence from intelligence officials or United Nations
inspectors that these weapons existed, Bush authorized
the use of military force to decimate the country and
destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.
As the weapons
of mass destruction remain undiscovered, many critics of
the war are starting to wonder aloud whether the US and
its allies were duped by the Bush administration.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Assistant
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom spent
a better part of the past decade advocating the use of
military force against Iraq, have apparently put the
issue to rest. Judging by recent interviews Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz gave to a handful of media outlets during the
past week, the short answer is yes, the public was
mislead into believing Iraq posed an imminent threat to
the United States.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz admit
that the plan to go to war with Iraq was initiated two
days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
On September 13, 2001, during a meeting at Camp
David with Bush, Rumsfeld and others in the Bush
administration, Wolfowitz said he discussed with Bush
the prospects of launching an attack against Iraq, for
no apparent reason other than a “gut feeling” Saddam
Hussein was involved in the attacks, and there was a
debate “about what place if any Iraq should have in a
counter terrorist strategy”.
“On the surface of
the debate it at least appeared to be about not whether
but when,” Wolfowitz said during the May 9 interview, a
transcript of which is posted on the Department of Defense website.
“There seemed to be a kind of agreement that yes it
should be, but the disagreement was whether it should be
in the immediate response or whether you should
concentrate simply on Afghanistan first.”
Wolfowitz said it was clear that because Saddam
Hussein “praised” the terrorist attacks of September 11,
Iraq joined Afghanistan at the top of the list of
countries the United States expected to attack in the
near future.
“To the extent it was a debate
about tactics and timing, the president clearly came
down on the side of Afghanistan first. To the extent it
was a debate about strategy and what the larger goal
was, it is at least clear with 20/20 hindsight that the
president came down on the side of the larger goal.”
In an interview with WABC-TV last week, Rumsfeld
took it a step further, saying that United States policy
had advocated regime change in Iraq since the 1990s and
that was also a reason behind the war in Iraq.
“If you go back and look at the debate in the
Congress and the debate in the United Nations, what we
said was the president said that this is a dangerous
regime, the policy of the United States government has
been regime change since the mid to late 1990s … and
that regime has now been changed. That is a very good
thing,” Rumsfeld said during the interview, a transcript
of which can be found here.
Rumsfeld’s
response is only partly true. He and Wolfowitz, along
with current Vice President Dick Cheney and others now
in the administration, wrote to then president Bill
Clinton in 1998 urging regime change in Iraq, but
Clinton rebuffed them, saying his administration was
focusing on dismantling al-Qaeda cells.
In the
bigger picture, Iraqis are better off without Saddam
Hussein, who ruled the country with an iron fist,
torturing and murdering any citizen who spoke against
his regime. But that’s beside the point. The issue is
the Bush administration lied to the world and launched
an unjustifiable war.
And it’s just the
beginning of a so-called two-front war the US is
planning against other “outlaw” regimes. The
administration is now ratcheting up the rhetoric on Iran
by making similar allegations that the country too poses
a threat to national security by harboring al-Qaeda
terrorists and building a nuclear arms arsenal.
Serious disagreements exist between the State
Department and the Bush administration on how to deal
with Iran, with the State Department pushing for an open
dialogue and the Bush administration pushing for a new
regime.
In a half a dozen interviews last week,
Rumsfeld refused to respond to questions about whether
the US would use military force to overthrow Iran’s
governing body. “That’s up to the president, but the
fact is that to the extent that Iran attempts to
influence what’s taking place in Iraq and tries to make
Iraq into their image, we will have to stop it. And to
the extent they have people from their Revolutionary
Guard in, they’re attempting to do that, why, we’ll have
to find them and capture them or kill them,” Rumsfeld
said in an interview last week with WCBS-TV.
Wolfowitz, however, is more direct on how to
deal with Iran. Responding to the question of whether
military force will be used to weed out the clerics
running the country, Wolfowitz said in an interview with
CNN International Saturday, “You know, I think you know,
we never rule out that kind of thing.”
(Copyright 2003 Jason Leopold)
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