911 Changed Nothing

Originally posted February 9, 2004

Peter Lee

July 23, 2004

George Bush needs to repackage his failed war of choice in Iraq as a noble, 9/11 crusade.

Too bad the facts won’t let him.

From the February 6 press gaggle:

QUESTION: They had nothing to do with September 11th, the Iraqis.

MR. McCLELLAN: Oh, I beg to differ. September 11th taught us that we are living in a dangerous new world. September 11th -

QUESTION: So you attack somebody who is innocent?

MR. McCLELLAN: September 11th taught us that we must confront gathering threats before it's too late. September 11th changed the equation.

“9/11 Changed Everything”

With the administration’s case for the Iraq war in disarray, it’s time to trot out the bloody flag of 9/11 to excuse the invasion.

Today this most evocative of slogans is used only to obscure a multitude of sins.

The neocons want us to believe that, after our national trauma of 9/11, George W. Bush and America somehow concluded a mystical pact between Fuhrer and Volk:

From now on we will fight fuzzily-conceived and sloppily-executed wars of choice in faraway places in utter disregard of prudence, evidence, and accountability.

In other words, we live in an age of desperate uncertainty. When we feel uncertain, we go overseas and kill people, even if they had nothing to do with 9/11. And then we feel better.

It’s a kind of group therapy through mass murder.

So our therapist-in-chief can go to war if and when he believes an intervention is desirable.

No need to wait for the imminent threat that international law demands as the justification for a pre-emptive military attack.

Or as the prez said on Meet The Press on February 8:

…we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war.

But Bush didn’t take us to war on a preventive basis to neutralize a potential danger from Iraq. He rushed the US into war by using the crisis-laden rhetoric of pre-emptive war to overhype the looming threat to America from Saddam Hussein.

For now, Bush isn’t ready to ‘fess up:

Russert: You gave the clear sense that this was an immediate threat that must be dealt with.

President Bush: I think, if I might remind you that in my language I called it a grave and gathering threat

I doubt the US public or the Congress understood the verbal (and legal) niceties involved in the Bush administration’s fudging the “imminent” threat distinction.

Not while we were being bombarded by the cacophony of incendiary and ultimately discredited WMD caterwauling; the background briefings that terrified our timid Solons with the vision of Iraqi drones spewing anthrax over Paducah; and the Condileezzian thunder about impending mushroom clouds that stampeded the spooked herd into the war corral.

Even today, with the Bush administration in full retreat, for some reason huge numbers of Americans are still laboring under the misapprehension that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat and responsible for 9/11 to boot.

In a development that should put a chill in the heart of any weasly little Texas pol who’s pretending he didn’t overhype the “imminence” of the Iraq threat — and dismay every blogger hoping to educate the public and save the world from the comfort of his or her keyboard - - according to a Newsweek poll, 55% of the American people apparently still believe the Saddam had WMDs and 49% believe he was personally involved in 9/11.

I think this is the last, titanic buzz of cognitive dissonance before Middle America’s head explodes from the unacceptable fact that our flag-waving superBush is actually a borderline war criminal running a taxpayer-subsidized slaughterhouse in Iraq.

Today, Bush is trying to have it both ways. Minutes after denying he called the Iraqi threat imminent, he tries to evade the corollary conclusion: that the Iraq war was a war of choice.

That’s because wars of choice that deliver little more than failure are not only political suicide; they are a ticket to a war crimes tribunal. Ask Hitler (invasion of Russia) and Tojo (Pearl Harbor).

Russert: In light of not finding the weapons of mass destruction, do you believe the war in Iraq is a war of choice or a war of necessity?

President Bush: I think that's an interesting question… It's a war of necessity.

Here’s why it was necessary to invade a WMD-free, al-Qaeda-linkless, militarily impotent, inspector-infested Iraq in the teeth of world opposition and with frantic haste on March 19, 2003:

For the sake of George W. Bush’s political credibility.

If Bush threatened to invade but didn’t invade, Saddam and the world would have thought we were pussies:

President Bush:…In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences. People look at us and say, they don't mean what they say, they are not willing to follow through.

Thanks to George’s prompt and decisive action, we dodged that bullet.

Now the world thinks we’re lying, warmongering idiots instead.

Whew!

So much for US credibility.

So much for the idea that we “had” to go to war, even though there wasn’t an imminent threat.

So much for the Bush doctrine of preventive war, predicated upon the invincible power, omnipotent intellect, and infallible judgment of one George W. Bush.

The president chose to take us to war — the wrong war.

If the best that Bush’s doctrine can deliver is an Iraq debacle of such astounding proportions, then we had better impeach him before the world attacks us in self-defense.

War, preventive or otherwise, is too dangerous a tool to be entrusted to our fumble-fingered Dubya.

Don’t bother trying to nail Bush to the cross of a misbegotten pre-emptive war. He can always claim that the intelligence was misread in haste, and the need for action outweighed the demands of evidence and reflection.

But preventive war is different. In fact, for Bush, it’s worse.

The choice to go to war is a political decision. The president is supposed to obtain the informed consent of the public and the Congress for this ultimate sanction.

Whether he did or not can be determined by examining the public record.

And it shows that while Bush and his administration legislated the Iraq invasion as a preventive war, they packaged it misleadingly as a pre-emptive war. The more Bush tries to evade responsibility for the barrage of war propaganda he unleashed, the worse he looks.

And when you go to war “at a time of our choosing” as Bush crowed triumphantly, he has the opportunity — and obligation — to get it right first. As in get the intel right; get the diplomacy right; get the occupation right; get the transition right; and get the exit strategy right.

Again, it’s a matter of public record that Bush didn’t get it right.

The Iraq war has delivered disappointment, dismay, and quagmire instead of glory and soaring poll numbers.

More and more, it looks like the epitaph of the Bush adventure in Iraq (and his regime as a whole) will be the one Talleyrand provided for a disastrous piece of imperial overreach committed by Napoleon:

“It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder”.

Iraq wasn’t an honest mistake

It was a dishonest mistake.

A mistake with enormous and irreparable consequences.

When the American people examine the meager harvest reaped from our invasion of Iraq, they will quickly conclude that hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of troops, and thousands of lives lost and shattered could have been put to better use elsewhere to assure the security of our nation.

Bush’s only hope is to try to evade responsibility by retroactively jettisoning the Hussein threat pretexts he used to start the war, and replacing them in the minds of the American people with a shameless emotional appeal to the shared memory of a profound national trauma that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Now he needs the political cover of pretending he charged to war under a heroic, bloody banner labeled “9/11”, instead of a tattered flag with the motto “second-rate intelligence politicized by third-rate president”.

But it’s not easy; the facts and even the evidence of his own enablers contradict him.

Russert cited the statement by Paul Wolfowitz that “(Saddam’s criminal mistreatment of the Iraqi people) by itself is a reason to help Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did.” and asked:

Russert: Is it worth the loss of 530 American lives and 3,000 injuries and woundings simply to remove Saddam Hussein, even though there were no weapons of mass destruction?...

President Bush: For the parents of the soldiers who have fallen who are listening, David Kay, the weapons inspector, came back and said, “In many ways Iraq was more dangerous than we thought.” It's we are in a war against these terrorists who will bring great harm to America, and I've asked these young ones to sacrifice for that.

If this specimen of misleading, logic-free garbled syntax is the best George can do, he can start packing his bags for Crawford.

First of all, what Kay really said in his NPR interview was “"I must say I actually think Iraq — what we learned during the inspections — made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.". (emphasis added).

Aaah…potentially. As opposed to actually.

We don’t go to war on “potential”.

Let’s see how many news outlets play gotcha with our tongue-tied POTUS on that flub.

How Saddam’s Iraq — a military and political basket case and profoundly hostile to Islamic fundamentalism — was “more dangerous than we thought” - potentially or otherwise — presents an interesting line of inquiry. I doubt it will redound to Bush’s credit.

The key question is whether thousands of shattered American military families — and American people — will accept the dishonest bromide that the sacrifices of their sons and daughters were a necessary cost of our “war on terror”, when the best Bush can come up with to justify the invasion is the claim that it was necessary to preserve US credibility.

Will the 9/11 dog still hunt in the 2004 elections, and help Bush obscure and excuse the disastrous consequences of his failed war of choice in Iraq?

I doubt Americans will continue to swallow the line that 9/11 “changed everything” and justified military adventurism in Iraq.

That motto is now clearly linked not to our national destiny or a crusade in the Middle East, but to GWB’s strategy for political self-preservation.

We’re now realizing that a lot of things didn’t change on 9/11:

The lunatics may have taken over the asylum, but the Constitution is still in force.

Americans still want the punishment to fit the crime, and they expect us to go to war with genuine threats and actual malefactors, not convenient victims.

We still honor truth, justice, responsibility, and accountability.

We risk American lives only when the vital interest of the country clearly demands it

And we can tell when a president is trying to peddle a line of bullshit.

As far as President Bush’s right and ability to lead this nation, 9/11 changed nothing:

George W. Bush is as unfit to lead today as he was on September 10, 2001, on the day he was sworn into office, and the day he lost the popular vote.

And as unfit as he will still be on November 3, 2004.

And there’s nothing he can do about that.

top ^