Washington’s Iraq victory was a major defeat in its war against international terrorism. Leaving aside the deceitful WMD claims, the US has never produced a shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq actively supported Al-Qaeda.
George W. Bush’s assault on Iraq was supposed to make the world a safer place. It is now patently obvious, maybe even to the president himself, that this was wrong. Indeed international security has plummeted now that Al-Qaeda has another cause to justify its crimes. The full extent of this misjudgment has become clearer thanks to the Washington senatorial commission investigating the events that led up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The former security adviser to both the Clinton and Bush administrations (as well as the Bush Sr. and Reagan White Houses before them), Richard Clarke, has told the bi-partisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks that from the moment he first entered the Oval office, Bush wanted to punish Iraq. According to Clarke, even after he was told that the evidence of Saddam’s involvement with Al-Qaeda did not add up, Bush made it clear he wanted Saddam. His administration meanwhile brushed aside warnings from Clarke that Bin Laden was planning a spectacular attack.
The invasion of Iraq and the subsequent struggle to control the country have diverted massive time and manpower from the war against terror. Clarke maintains that Bush was obsessed with Saddam and dismissed intelligence warnings about terror. CIA Director George Tenet only partially exonerated the president when he said that information about an imminent attack was tantalizingly vague.
Nevertheless, if the administration had fixated on Al-Qaeda rather than Saddam, could Sept. 11 have been avoided? The Senate commission is unlikely to blame either Clinton or Bush for what turned out to be a tragic blunder. Clarke himself admits that throughout the administration his increasingly urgent warnings were ignored, perhaps because they seemed so incredible.
In the end, it is not that Bush ignored the warnings but why he did so, which may yet diminish his standing with the American electorate come this November. It is becoming increasingly evident that Bush was finishing unfinished family business in ousting Saddam. His father had liberated Kuwait, but after the highly publicized carnage among fleeing Iraqi troops on the Basra highway, the pressure to stop the killing became intense. Whatever plans, the then administration had to ignore its wiser allies and press on to Baghdad were shelved. Saddam survived to mock the US president who had once had him at his mercy. In ending his father’s humiliation, George W. Bush ignored the rising monster of Al-Qaeda. History may judge his error harshly.
