Posted on 01/08/2006 9:25:59 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Why did the administration pick Iraq as a target for the war it needed and wanted? Why risk death to more than 2,000 Americans and more than 30,000 Iraqis? As part of his current public relations campaign, President Bush admits that much of the intelligence on which the Iraq war was based had been faulty. He assumes responsibility but blames the intelligence services. However, he goes on to say that the removal of Saddam Hussein was the "right" thing to do. Saddam is a bad man. He has killed his own people. He caused instability in that part of the world. He hates America. He was always a threat. We had to get rid of him.
Many Americans are willing even now to swallow such obfuscation even though it is a cover-up for the phony rationale propounded two years ago.
The proper question is, of all the bad people in the world, why was Saddam Hussein targeted? The president's charges could be leveled against many of the sociopaths on the loose in Asia, Africa and South America.
Who but far-out liberals would object to an attack on Fidel Castro? Or, more recently, Hugo Chavez? What about Kim Jong Il, of Korea? Surely he is a greater threat to the United States than Saddam. Or the Muslim Arabs in Khartoum who have been practicing genocide against black Christians in southern Sudan and black Muslims in Darfur? Or the Shiite Grand Ayatollahs in Iran? Or the shifty Syrians who have been stirring up trouble for 30 years? Once we win "victory" in Iraq, who will be our next target? Not all these leaders, it might be said, are threats to the United States. But was Saddam a threat a couple of years ago? The president says he was, but where is the evidence that Iraqi terror was aimed at the United States? There is plenty of terror there now, but didn't our invasion and occupation create it?
With a wide selection of possible targets, why did the administration pick Iraq?
The first reason is that the administration needed a war as an excuse to enhance the wartime powers of the commander in chief. The United States had swept away the scruffy Taliban in short order. The "war" on terrorism needed another target. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was sure that Iraq would be a pushover. Shock and awe, some special forces and a compact expeditionary force would wipe out Saddam and all his troops in short order. Had we not driven them out of Kuwait as one would swat an annoying mosquito? It would doubtless be an easier job than even "taking out" Castro.
Moreover, the generally pro-Israel neo-conservative intellectuals assured the administration that a Democratic Iraq would "reconfigure" the situation in the Middle East. The way to Jerusalem, they insisted, was through Baghdad. So Iraq was the obvious target for another "war on terrorism" even though the evidence that Iraq had cooperated in terror against the United States or was even planning on it was thin — and we know now nonexistent.
Behind the administration's assumptions were two huge and costly errors. The first was the notion that resistance in Iraq would collapse immediately. The president, the vice president and the secretary of defense were utterly unprepared for the "insurgency" and even now show no sign that they know what to do about it. The second was that Iraq was prepared for democracy. They assumed and still do that if you can organize a fair election and the majority wins, you have, ipso facto, a democracy. What you are more likely to have is Shiite theocracy and a Sunni caliphate in civil war. There is no tradition in Iraq of a civil society in which the various factions would share power and abandon their historical propensity to kill one another — a propensity that was recorded in all the history books about Mesopotamia that the neo-cons and the president had not read.
So the president's argument that America must "stay the course" in Iraq till "victory" is as worthless as his previous argument that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. "Victory" will come only when Sunni and the Shia stop killing one another, and that will not happen in the lifetime of any of us, a hopeless task as ought to be evident by now.
And, by the way, might one ask when the American bishops are going to follow the pope's good example and condemn torture, even when the victims are not American citizens?
Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, author and sociologist. He teaches at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona. His column on political, church and social issues appears each Friday in the Daily Southtown. Father Greeley's e-mail address is Agreel@aol.com, and his home page, which includes homilies for every Sunday, is www. agreeley.com.
I didn't say anything about Fr. Greeley.
We know that President Tyler provoked a war with Mexico.
We know that William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt pressured a reluctant President McKinley into asking for a declaration of war against Spain on the flimsiest of evidence.
We know (it's on the Johnson White House tapes) that LBJ sent the US military into a war he didn't believe he could win because he was afraid that Barry Goldwater would label him as "the Man who lost Vietnam" in the upcoming '64 Presidential campaign.
But it takes a jerk like father Larry Flynt Greeley to overlook Saddam Hussein's universally acknowledged threats, attacks and provocations against Americans and American interests, and manufacture a "Bush needed to expand his power" rationale for the War in Iraq.
Maybe some of those places the guy mentioned will be next. Like it or not, a military power like the US needs a war every ten years, or twenty at the most. The military is about the only institution where the people in charge wear their resumes on their chests, and a Pentagon full of birds and generals with no purple hearts or other combat ribbons in their salad would look pretty lame. It goes to reason that officers who have seen real combat are going to be better equipped to wage war whenever it is necessary.
That being said, Iraq was the perfect, deserving target - - a sadistic, murderous regime, a strategic location, and a bona fide threat to acquire more WMDs (which they had already used against the Kurds), as well as a history of attempting to assassinate a former US President, shooting at American planes, supporting and harboring terrorists (Abu Nidal, for example), and SCUD missle launches against our strongest Middle Eastern ally, Israel. Oil, which is of vital importance to our economy and therefore to our national security, is also certainly a factor, and nobody should be bashful about admitting it.
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