Sadder and wiser about Iraq

In January 2003, a few weeks before the United States went to war in Iraq, I wrote in this newspaper about what appeared to be a double standard or maybe no standard in Bush administration foreign policy: 

“Iraq has allowed U.N. inspectors to resume searching for whatever deadly weapons it may have, has released lists of its scientists, seems willing to have them leave the country for questioning and has yet to build a nuclear bomb. Therefore, we may be about to go to war with Iraq.”

At the same, “North Korea has thrown out its U.N. arms inspectors” and “announced its intention to resume the manufacture of nuclear weapons” but “we are not about to go to war with North Korea.” I was on to something — there was no earthly reason for going to war in Iraq.

I wondered if “having gone to all the trouble of building up the threat of Saddam Hussein, President Bush doesn’t want to trade tyrants in midstream.

“Or maybe, the administration prefers a war with Iraq because it can be done on the cheap, between $50 billion and $60 billion.” I mentioned this estimate was disputed by the president’s chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, who got fired when he said the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. He was, of course, only off by about a trillion dollars.

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Then I found another column from the fall of 2002 I never finished. It questioned the Bush people’s motives and began by asking, “What’s the hurry?

“Even though there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein is, among a number of others, a threat to the security of the United States and its people, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that we are being stampeded into a war with him to accommodate the politicians with a stake in the coming mid-term election and the next run for the presidency.

“Much has been made of the case cleverly laid before the United Nations by President Bush but it is a case that could have been made months, even years ago. If, in fact, the Saddam Hussein threat was overlooked in the Clinton years, why was that little matter ignored by candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign? Was the policy of containment so wrong that it must be replaced by a unilateral war followed by who knows what? 

“With a sagging economy, a profound need for health-care reform and other domestic issues relegated to the sidelines by war talk, President Bush has deftly won control of the coming election....”

And there I stopped. You will notice that I had swallowed the myth that Saddam threatened our security but why didn’t I continue? Was I reluctant to go against the prevailing wisdom? Don’t forget a lot of smart people from both parties, people like Hillary Clinton, supported the war.

I made up for it a bit in April 2003, a month after the war started. John Kerry, one of the potential Democratic candidates in 2004, had gotten into trouble for remarking that “what we need is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.”

The Republican national chairman screamed, “Sen.Kerry crossed a grave line when he dared to suggest a replacement of America’s commander in chief at a time when America is at war.” 

Without imagining what friends of Bush would do later to malign the war record of the highly decorated Kerry, I compared his Vietnam experience to the future commander in chief, who “was defending the friendly skies of Texas against the Viet Cong as an occasional member of the Air National Guard.”

And I recalled Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican they’d never invite to CPAC today, who wrote this during a bigger war in 1917: 

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American people.”

And now, a decade later, when we’re all sadder and wiser about Iraq and we’re at the “who knows what” stage in the Middle East, I wish I’d been smart enough to have finished that other column.

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at dahles@hotmail.com.