The Downing Street Memo (7/19/05)

Last month, President Bush, in a prime-time televised speech, asked Americans for our patience. With his poll numbers dropping like a lead balloon, he tried to bolster support for the Iraq war by tying it to the September 11 terrorist attacks and to concern for our troops. So let’s examine the history and reality of his war.

After the 9/11 attacks, Bush declared himself a “war president,” then morphed the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein. The results: Osama is still free; Al Qaeda has expanded its lethal outreach; the Iraqi insurgency keeps growing; and worldwide terrorism has increased. Over 1700 Americans have been killed in Iraq, over 30,000 have been wounded, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed. Billions of dollars flow away from America’s needs, such as health care, education and affordable housing, to pay for Bush’s war.

The administration has worked hard to prevent any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But five facts are clear:

1. Iraq and Saddam were NOT connected to the 9/11 attacks. In fact 15 of the 19 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, a country where the Bush family has close ties.
2. Iraq had NO weapons of mass destruction, despite White House declarations and Donald Rumsfeld’s statement that he knew where the WMDs were. If he knew, then why didn’t he tell the UN inspectors their locations so we could avoid war?
3. The Iraqis never asked us to invade their country, and certainly did NOT hail us as liberators with flowers and dancing in the streets as the Bush team predicted.
4. Despite Paul Wolfowitz’s assurance (remember him?) that the war’s monetary cost would be paid by Iraqi oil, we the American people are paying for it. In fact, more Iraqi oil now disappears into the black market than when Saddam was in power.
5. The coalition of the willing rapidly shrinks while worldwide, anti-Americanism grows.

Bush has reframed the reason for war as one of bringing freedom and democracy to the world. But, there are plenty of other horrible dictators wreaking genocides in other countries. Will we invade those countries? That Bush wanted a war with Iraq has now been clearly exposed by the Downing Street Memo. The memo records the minutes of the British Prime Minster’s meeting in July 2002 (well before we went to war in March 2003). At that meeting, the British overseas intelligence chief briefed his colleagues about his talks in Washington with the Bush team. The memo says "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The National Security Council had no patience with the UN route and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." There’s a lot more. Read the Downing Street Memo at www.downingstreetmemo.com. The Republicans in Congress are refusing to hold hearings on it.

Iraq was no threat until we invaded it and was no breeding ground for terrorists until we did so; now it’s a horrible, costly mess with no end in sight; yet, the administration is not being held accountable. President Bush has NOT provided any exit strategy, only saying we must stay until Iraq is secure. Will that mean 12 more years in Iraq as Rumsfeld has projected? How many more American and Iraqi lives? How much more money? As columnist Bob Herbert recently wrote: If a Democratic administration had conducted a war this incompetently, the Republicans in Congress would be dusting off their impeachment manuals.

- Judith Kohler

Commentaries Home