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Reasons for war Another One Bites the DustBy Rick Horowitz
They could be wrong, you know. All those staffers who've been working for the 9/11 commission, sifting through the evidence and writing their reports -- they could be totally wrong about the relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Which is to say, about the lack of a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. They're only human, after all. (The staffers, I mean -- there's some debate about Saddam Hussein. And no debate at all about al-Qaeda.) Humans make mistakes. They misread things. They overlook things. They see what they expect to see. Besides, conspirators don't hold news conferences. If Saddam ever was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, it wouldn't have been the kind of thing he'd shout from Baghdad's rooftops. So the fact that the commission's staffers couldn't find any credible evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between the dictator and the terrorist group -- what does that prove? Not much. Only -- maybe -- that these guys are even better at keeping secrets than we thought they were. It certainly doesn't prove that President Bush was mistaken when he kept pounding on that relationship as one of the big reasons to go to war against Iraq. Or that he's mistaken now when he and Vice President Cheney keep mentioning that relationship as a justification for our being there. It's possible the president knows something he's not telling the rest of us. Or that the smoking gun is only minutes from being discovered, at which point we'll realize that the president was right all along, and that his critics were all wet. Still... Does it worry you just a little that after so much time and so much effort, we still haven't come up with the smoking gun? Or any gun? Or even some bullets? "Where there's smoke, there's fire" -- you bet. But where there isn't even a wisp of smoke...? You'd think that somebody would talk. That somebody would give it up, if there's anything to give -- or even if there isn't. You'd think that, with as many "detainees" as we've thrown into cells in these past months, and with their interrogations conducted as "aggressively" (what a polite word!) as they've been conducted, that somebody would have spilled the beans -- or even made up some beans, just to make the beatings stop. But still no beans. It makes you wonder. And for that matter, still no weapons of mass destruction. That was the other big reason, of course, the other drum the president kept beating as he marched us to war: Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Not intentions. Not desires. Not "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Actual weapons -- WMD, and plenty of 'em! So where are they? Why haven't we found them? You don't hear the president saying much about weapons of mass destruction lately. It must have gotten a little embarrassing after a while -- so much talk, so little evidence -- so his speechwriters just stopped including it, and the president stopped mentioning it. There's every chance they'll try to work the same magic with Saddam's "ties" to al-Qaeda: Now you say it, now you don't. In which case, the president may be reduced to talking about the joys of bringing democracy to Iraq -- a perfectly nice thing to talk about, although a bit of a bait-and-switch, since improving the lives of Iraqis certainly wasn't why we invaded the place. A perfectly nice thing to talk about if you don't let yourself think about what else we could be doing with all those troops and all those billions. A perfectly nice thing to talk about if you can ignore the grenades and the car bombs. A perfectly nice thing to talk about if you can convince yourself that turning even more of the Muslim world against us somehow makes us safer here at home. It's entirely possible that the president and his people can do all that. But they could be wrong, you know. Posted 6/17/04. Get
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Rick Horowitz
