If you keep saying something long enough, according to an old axiom of politics and human nature, people will begin to believe it–whether you have evidence to back it up or not.
So, too, goes the Bush administration as it tries to convince the rest of us that its proposed war against Saddam Hussein has something–Anything!–to do with the war against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
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Prior to Sept. 11, Bush showed no more than passing interest in the Middle East, let alone Iraq, unlike his father, for whom foreign policy was an important pastime.
Despite the pleadings of experts for Bush to help nudge the Israelis and Palestinians back to a bargaining table during the hot summer of 2001, the younger Bush’s foreign policy was captured in the old song title, “Make the World Go Away.”
Then along came Sept. 11 and the notion was advanced that Hussein and bin Laden were linked, despite bin Laden’s history of disgust for Hussein’s secular state. Alas, the CIA later dismissed those reports.
So the president next cited Hussein’s ability to develop or to get his hands on nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Suddenly, in a radical departure from our history and tradition, stripping other nations of such capabilities had become the job of us, the United States, and us alone.
Then, in his State of the Union address, Bush was declaring Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, to be part of an “axis of evil” that required continuing U.S. action.
How did Hussein zoom to the top of our most-wanted list?
The question is particularly intriguing in light of newly released testimony that was made in February before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Released on Halloween, the testimony quotes intelligence experts who make Iraq sound much less menacing than its neighbor Iran.
For example, Iran actively “supports terrorism–including Palestinian rejectionist groups and Hezbollah”–against Israel. It is vigorously pursuing “expanded WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic missile capabilities” and already “has some of the most advanced WMD and ballistic missile programs in the Middle East,” the intelligence sources said.
Hussein, by comparison, is portrayed as still trying to expand “an infrastructure capable of producing” nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq has a “long history of supporting terrorists,” to be sure, “including giving sanctuary to [the late terrorist leader] Abu Nidal,” but nothing in the testimony suggests that Iraq has as many Al Qaeda terrorists on its soil as we have on American soil.
Yet Donald Rumsfeld, our hawkish defense secretary, began beating the drum against Iraq immediately after Sept. 11, repeatedly suggesting “that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately,” writes Bob Woodward in his new book “Bush at War.”
But Woodward does not explain why Bush abruptly shifted in April to call for “regime change” in Iraq and again in June to announcing pre-emptive strikes against any country believed to be a threat to the United States.
Only in the autumn did Bush acquiesce to cooler dovish heads, like Secretary of State Colin Powell, in seeking the diplomatic path. Good move. If Hussein is such a big threat to world peace, why go after him alone? He has plenty of enemies around the world, especially in his own neighborhood.
Yet the administration still suffers from what Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) called “shifting justifications” for taking military action in Iraq.
Instead, after months of failures by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to come up with any evidence that it is willing to share with the public of a Hussein and Al Qaeda link, Rumsfeld created a new mini-intelligence unit in the Pentagon in October for the express purpose of finding such a link.
Heading up the new unit is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a leader among the hawks who were pushing for toppling Hussein long before Sept. 11.
In other words, if your intelligence agencies are not telling you what you want to hear, maybe a new unit of outside experts will.
Sensible as it is for a country to be secretive about how it is going to war, the Bush administration has been uncommonly uncandid about why it wants to go to war.
The administration assures us that a war with Iraq won’t take long. I’ve heard that before. As an Army veteran who was drafted during the Vietnam War, I am loath to see my country send its military into another war with the best of intentions but too little consideration for why we are going in and how we are going to leave.
What direct threat does Saddam Hussein pose to the United States? The Bush administration says it knows, but so far it is not really telling us much, except for its “shifting justifications.”
The public has a right to know why it is going to war–and we in the media have an obligation to ask.
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