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COMMENTARY
A war based on fallacious
reasoning
By Erich Marquardt
Last Wednesday, US President George W Bush
admitted there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had
any role in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on
the United States. Bush stated: "We've had no evidence
that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11." The
day before, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
made similar comments, telling ABC's Nightline:
"We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either
direction or control of [September 11]." Yet despite
these statements by members of the Bush administration,
according to a recent poll, some 70 percent of Americans
believe that Saddam was personally involved with the
terrorist attacks of that day.
It is obvious why
the American people believe this to be true: While there
is clearly no serious evidence linking Saddam to the
September 11 hijackings, members of the Bush
administration consistently justified their invasion of
Iraq by implying a connection between the two over the
past two years. Bush himself frequently made statements
linking Saddam and September 11 by placing the two
previously separate issues within the same context
during speeches advocating an invasion of Iraq.
For example, Bush argued on October 7, 2002:
"We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in
bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know
that after September 11, Saddam Hussein's regime
gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."
As recently as May 1 this year, Bush warned: "The battle
of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on
September 11, 2001 - and still goes on." And as recent
as September 14, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed, "If
we're successful in Iraq ... then we will have struck a
major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will,
the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us
under assault now for many years, but most especially on
[September 11]."
By not making concrete
statements connecting Saddam and the September 11
attacks, the Bush administration was able to avoid
explicitly lying to the American people - while at the
same time achieving its objectives of getting support
for a US intervention in Iraq by putting Saddam's
government into the same political and military context
as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. From this perspective, the recent comments
made by administration officials denying that they've
ever tried to connect Saddam and September 11 are being
made in order to disarm critics who charge that the
administration misled the American people into
supporting the war in Iraq.
Washington's desire
to overthrow the leadership in Iraq has been evident
since the Gulf War in 1991. However, because of the
risks and costs involved in removing a foreign
government - costs that are evident now as the United
States struggles to maintain order in Iraq - the
administration of the current president's father, George
H W Bush, decided against such a radical foreign-policy
objective and instead decided to weaken Iraq slowly
through economic sanctions. The administration of
president Bill Clinton continued this policy by
unwaveringly maintaining the sanctions regime.
Yet despite this there was a group of
politicians and academics constantly lobbying to have
the Ba'ath Party removed from power in Iraq through
military force. These individuals - known as the
neo-conservatives and mostly working within the American
Enterprise Institute and its underling, the Project for
the New American Century (PNAC) - managed to achieve
much influence and clout with the election of George W
Bush and hoped to present their radical foreign-policy
objectives of removing the Ba'ath Party along with
"reshaping" the Middle East in a manner that would
better serve US interests.
However, these
individuals failed to put this policy into effect during
the first nine months of 2001, as the political
bureaucracy in Washington is traditionally hesitant
about taking drastic foreign-policy actions that could
result in great risks and costs to US interests. Indeed,
members of the Bush administration who were part of the
neo-conservative camp - such as Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage and Under Secretary of State for Disarmament
John Bolton - were aware of this difficulty in pursuing
their broad strategic foreign-policy plans; in a report
before the 2000 elections, the PNAC said it would be
difficult to realize their objectives - one being the
removal of Saddam in Iraq - without "some catastrophic
and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor".
With the September 11 attacks, and the
widespread fear they caused not only in Washington but
throughout the United States, the Bush administration
knew it could use the attacks and the emotional
maelstrom they created to their advantage. By
insinuating that Saddam was somehow involved in the
attack, the Bush administration successfully made their
case for removing the leadership in Baghdad.
This chain of events highlights the difficulty
that governments practicing democratic ideals have in
achieving foreign-policy objectives, especially moralist
democracies such as the United States. While
non-democratic governments are able to implement radical
foreign-policy plans as long as they can prevent their
people from rebelling - usually through the use of
physical repression - democratic governments are held
accountable by their voting population. Therefore,
instead of publicly explaining foreign-policy objectives
and decisions, democratic leaders often find themselves
having to mask their pursuit of national interests and
power politics with moral explanations. This is most
evident in recent US politics, from the fight against
the "evil empire" in the Soviet Union, to stopping a
"butcher" in Yugoslavia, to hunting down "evildoers" all
over the world.
The fear of Iraq developing
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to be used against the
United States was also used by the Bush administration
to shore up support for an intervention in Iraq. Last
October 7, Bush stated in a speech in Ohio: "The Iraqi
regime ... possesses and produces chemical and
biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons ...
Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding
facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear
program in the past." In another statement from October,
Bush said that Iraq "is reconstituting its
nuclear-weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held
numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group
he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' ... his nuclear holy
warriors ..."
On March 30 this year, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that he knew where
Iraq's WMD were located, asserting, "We know where they
are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and
east, west, south and north somewhat." Yet now Rumsfeld
has retreated from prewar claims that Iraq had massive
stockpiles of WMD. Now that such weapons have not been
found, Rumsfeld said, "Sometimes I overstate for
emphasis. I should have said, 'I believe they're in that
area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area,
and that was our best judgment.'"
Like Bush,
Cheney argued three days before the invasion of Iraq
that Saddam had "reconstituted nuclear weapons". Yet
when this turned out to be a clear falsity, Cheney later
said, "I misspoke. We never had evidence that [Saddam]
had acquired a nuclear weapon." Instead, Cheney is now
saying that Saddam only had "aspirations to acquire a
nuclear weapon".
Despite all of the previous
claims by administration officials regarding Saddam's
"reconstituted" nuclear-weapons program, somehow
Rumsfeld said in June, "I don't know anybody in any
government or any intelligence agency who suggested that
the Iraqis had nuclear weapons."
Finally, in
addition to insinuating that Saddam was involved in the
September 11 attacks and that Saddam also either had or
was developing nuclear weapons, the Bush administration
has tried to argue that individual Iraqis are not
fighting against the US occupation in Iraq, but instead
resistance is only from former members of Saddam's
regime, al-Qaeda and foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq.
For example, in June Rumsfeld told the House Armed
Services Committee, "I think these people [attacking
occupation forces] are the last remnants of a dying
cause." He said US forces "have the sympathy of the
population, not the surviving elements of the Ba'athist
regime". Following this trend, last week Wolfowitz
claimed that "a great many of [Osama] bin Laden's key
lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation
with old loyalists from the Saddam regime to attack in
Iraq." When questioned about this claim, Wolfowitz said,
"It's not 'a great many' - it's one."
Furthermore, this comes shortly before the
commander of the US-led coalition in Iraq,
Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, told The Times of
London that ordinary Iraqis are also resisting the US
occupation. In response to complaints about persistent
civilian casualties in Iraq and cases of US soldiers
dealing heavy handedly with Iraqi civilians, Sanchez
conceded, "We have seen that when we have an incident in
the conduct of our operations, when we killed an
innocent civilian, based on their ethic, their values,
their culture, they would seek revenge."
The
Bush administration has consistently framed its
foreign-policy objectives in ways in which they will
receive support from the American people, through the
use of "moral logic" and a virtual demagoguery of sorts
expressed in its preoccupation with security. Only a
small percentage of Americans would still find palatable
the United States' foreign-policy objectives if
expressed in the terms power politics, economic
interests, and realpolitik.
Published with
permission of the Power and Interest News Report,
an analysis-based publication that seeks to provide
insight into various conflicts, regions and points of
interest around the globe. All comments should be
directed to content@pinr.com.
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