This week the United States passed a milestone on its long and bloody route of folly in the Middle East. This point should more accurately be described as a tombstone. When three US soldiers died in a bomb attack in Baghdad on Tuesday, the number of US military personnel slain in Iraq surpassed the 2,973 victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Leaving aside the horrific loss of Iraqi lives since the invasion, this then is the math of President Bush’s revenge for Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the US homeland. He has now thrown away just as many American lives as were lost on 9/11. And for what? Saddam Hussein was guilty of many crimes. But Al-Qaeda’s onslaught on New York and Washington was not one of them. Indeed, when Osama Bin Laden dispatched emissaries to Baghdad with an offer of cooperation against the common American enemy, Saddam sent them packing. In terms of Bush’s war on Al-Qaeda and international terror, the invasion of Iraq was therefore utterly without justification.
So in his own aggressive terms, Bush has wasted every single one of the American dead in Iraq. With few exceptions, none of the slain did anything to rid the world of the evil of international terror. Indeed, the reverse is true. By sending his powerful armies into a street-fighting war for which they were ill equipped, both in training and understanding, Bush has given international terror a bombing and shooting gallery in which US citizens were sitting ducks. On March 23, 2003, when the first US missiles rained down on Baghdad, there probably was not a single Al-Qaeda man in Iraq. But within weeks of Saddam’s ouster, they were gathering like vultures to road kill. They have since fed and grown stronger on a diet of almost 3,000 US and maybe as many as 60,000 Iraqi dead. In these terms alone, the Bush mission in Iraq has been a stunningly comprehensive failure.
But these were never Bush’s terms. His invasion of Iraq was certainly revenge, but not for 9/11. It was revenge for Saddam’s survival after his comprehensive defeat in the first Gulf War.
There were those in the White House in 1991 that were tempted to follow the routed Iraqi forces in their headlong retreat from Kuwait back into Iraq, to finish the job and capture Baghdad and oust the regime. Others, thinking that keeping Saddam in place served as a stabilizing factor against Iran, supported a drawdown rather than marching onward to Baghdad. Some have speculated that Bush’s decision to oust Saddam may have been partly influenced by his eagerness to do something his father wasn’t willing to risk. Instead, the Americans kept their no-fly zones and encouraged southern Shiites and northern Kurds to overthrow what was left of Saddam’s regime. They tried and were crushed with extreme brutality while Washington looked on helplessly.
His son set out to set the record straight, for better or worse. I turns out that it was for the worse, and it seems that American and Iraq lives have been lost over a simple matter of Bush family honor.
