Bush’s administration misled the American people about the reason for going to war with Iraq. But they were so sure, so certain.
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told us that Saddam Hussein was a madman with weapons of mass destruction, and that we could not wait until the smoking gun becomes a “mushroom cloud.”
Bush said that the situation was “urgent,” there was “clear evidence of peril” and that we must act now.
Secretary of State Powell told us that we had pictures of the mobile laboratories where the WMDs were made.
Tragically, Bush sent our soldiers to die in a distant land on false information. There were no weapons of mass destruction.
Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay now tells us that “we were all wrong.” CIA Director George Tenant now tells us that he never told Bush that Saddam Hussein was “an imminent threat.” Rice now tells us that we went to war to stabilize the Middle East. Bush claims that we went to war to spread democracy through the Middle East. Powell now tells us that those mobile labs were probably used to make weather balloons.
State Department official Greg Theilman tells us that there was strong disagreement among intelligence analysts in the Departments of State, Defense and the CIA over whether Iraq had WMDs.
But Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz now tells us that the Bush administration settled on WMDs as the rationale for war because that was the only way they could persuade the American people to accept the war.
Those who counseled an American incursion into that forbidden region ignored the elemental lessons of history.
In 1965, when Undersecretary of State George Ball warned President Johnson that 500,000 troops would be needed to win the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon ridiculed his assessment. Three years later there were 536,000 troops in Vietnam and 30,610 had died. Even then, we did not win.
When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army’s top general, warned President Bush that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to win the war in Iraq and secure peace, the Pentagon ridiculed Shinseki’s assessment and drummed him out of the corps.
They say that more troops will be sent to Iraq and those who are there will stay longer.
Although his administration misconstrued pre-war intelligence and miscalculated the complexities of postwar security, Bush can think of no mistake he has made. Perhaps his greatest mistake was not to take his earthly father’s advice.
In his 1998 memoirs, A World Transformed, Bush Sr. explained why he did not invade Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991. An invasion, he wrote: “would have incurred incalculable human and political costs….We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq…there was no ‘exit strategy’ we could see. Had we gone the invasion route, the U. S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”
For years, perhaps for generations, Americans will be paying the “incalculable human and political costs” for the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Bush is not a bad person, but he made a bad mistake. And because he doesn’t think he made a mistake, he isn’t the person to correct it, and he is more likely to repeat it.
There is no easy way out of Iraq, but we’ve got to start somewhere. The first step in formulating an exit strategy is electing a new president.
David Sansing is a professor of history at the University of Mississippi.