If we forget for a moment that the evidence Washington had about Saddam’s involvement with Al-Qaeda was plain wrong and put aside also why it was so wrong, we can concentrate on the real issue, which is that George W. Bush wanted it to be true. Therein lies the key to why the US president’s war against international terror, far from being the precisely targeted campaign that was promised, has spiraled out of control.
The Congressional enquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks has now confirmed it has found no link whatsoever between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The one occasion when Osama bin Laden asked Iraq for support, he was ignored. It is also now well established that Saddam’s once vigorous WMD programs were over. The two grounds on which Bush and his allies in the coalition went to war, the reasons that they plunged Iraq into the chaos in which it is today, were completely false.
Yet the extraordinary fact is that although the lives of some 600 American soldiers along with billions of US tax dollars have been poured into the Iraq conflict, most Americans are still unconcerned that their country acted on an error.
There seems to be an alarming correlation between the amount of time that a falsehood rests uncorrected in the public domain and the degree to which it ceases to matter. Even before the decision to invade, UN weapons inspectors had failed to turn up any firm evidence of new WMD programs. Though Iraqis were being obstructive and Saddam chose to pretend that he still had WMD, the view of the UN inspectors — including American David Kay, the last chief of the inspection mission — was that on balance of probability there was no longer anything to find. Yet neither Washington nor London has admitted that it was wrong about WMD. In America, the majority of citizens do not care.
There remains Saddam’s alleged link to Al-Qaeda. In January the respected Carnegie Endowment reported that it could find no association between the terrorists and Iraq. That view has now been confirmed by the Congressional commission. When on Monday, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, Vice President Dick Cheney repeated that Iraq and Al-Qaeda had “long-established links”, there was little public reaction.
The conclusion has to be that it was not simply Bush and his hawkish aides in the White House who wanted to believe in Saddam’s complicity in the Sept.11 attacks. The American public did too, and they are not about to admit the error.
The irony is that by believing what he wanted to hear and ignoring the advice of friendly governments while shutting out informed officials within his government, Bush launched his country upon an adventure that has seriously damaged his war against international terror. However much he believes that he has liberated the Iraqi people from a ruthless tyrant, the plain fact is that since the first US cruise missile struck Baghdad on March 20 last year, the world has become a more dangerous place and international terror, far from being dealt a mortal blow, has flourished.
