Politicians are human and humans make mistakes. However, the modern political code is that to admit to error is electoral suicide. The Washington-led invasion of Iraq has resulted in the loss of thousands of lives, the majority Iraqi, but more than a thousand of them American. It is likely to rank as the biggest US blunder since Vietnam. Yet the Bush regime continues to pretend that it made no grievous errors of judgment and that its intervention in Iraq is basically a success.
The Iraq Survey Group reported on Wednesday that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the public reason for US intervention, no longer existed nor did any active programs to develop them. From President Bush’s point of view, the best that chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer could tell the US Senate Armed Services Committee was that there was clear evidence that the Iraqi dictator “intended” to resume his WMD program as soon as sanctions were lifted.
If an intention is any reason for a pre-emptive attack upon Iraq then it could be argued that Saddam Hussein would have been equally justified in attacking America since it is now crystal clear that the minute he won the White House in 2000, George W. Bush “intended” to find some pretence to finish his father’s 1991 Gulf War. In this sense, there was no “error”. What took place in March 2003 was a war that had probably been part of Bush’s thinking before he even decided definitely to seek Republican nomination. If this is indeed true, then the president has some serious questions to answer about the way in which he used the traumatic horror of 9/11 as the excuse to settle this family score with Saddam Hussein.
He promised to avenge the American people on Osama Bin Laden and his butchers. First came the ouster of the Taleban in Afghanistan and the destruction of much but not all of the Al-Qaeda cadres in that country. It was the right campaign, even if the aftermath has been marred by a colossal failure of rich Western nations to honor their generous aid promises to this war-ravaged country. But then Bush maneuvered the international campaign against terrorism away from Al-Qaeda and onto Saddam. He used false intelligence on WMD and Al-Qaeda links to Saddam to justify his aggression.
In the main, America trusted him and gladly sent its sons into harm’s way. The Bush family got their victory when Saddam was overthrown. But who else has won, except the forces of violence and disorder and Al-Qaeda itself, the very targets at which the war was allegedly aiming? The reasons Bush does not admit that he made an error is that what he did was deliberate. If he shifts his established political position, it will be as good as admitting that he has duped American voters into believing that the destruction of Saddam would deal a body blow to Osama Bin Laden. Every shred of evidence from the WMD investigators themselves, from the bloodstained streets of Iraq and from the fast-filling cemeteries in both Iraq and the US shows that this is patently untrue.
