Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [119]
The background on the “insinuation” is that the Turkish and American military are very tight, and a few years back the Turkish military had pushed out an Islamist government there. We were implicitly threatening a democratic ally with a military coup—so we could bring democracy to Iraq, of course. No opposition was greeted with anything but contempt and derision, as though anybody who dared to say, “You know, this might not be a good idea” was stabbing us in the back. NATO was fraying. President Bush warned the United Nations to “show backbone and courage,” to stand up to Iraq or “be seen as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society.”
Since the United Nations is in business to prevent war, not promote it, there seemed to be a failure to communicate. Our shifting rationale for taking out Saddam Hussein—first it was “regime change,” then disarmament, then he had a nuclear program, next he was suddenly in bed with al-Qaeda and about to hand off anthrax to terrorists, then it was because Iraq was in violation of Resolution 1441 (as though Israel had not been in violation of dozens of U.N. resolutions for decades), then it was weapons of mass destruction, then we couldn’t back down because it would destroy our “credibility,” then it was regime change again—led to further confusion. As Paul Freundlich put it at the start of the war: “All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We’re going to wage war to preserve the U.N.’s ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the U.N.’s word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then, by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?”
The discussion veered off into cuckooland, with the left screaming, “No blood for oil!” and the right screaming that anyone who had doubts about invading Iraq was a Saddam sympathizer. Osama bin Laden popped back up to add to the festivities. By the time the United States went to war on March 19, 42 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, something that had never even been claimed by the Bush administration. According to a poll conducted by ABC News, 55 percent believed Hussein had given direct support to al-Qaeda, for which there was no evidence. Doesn’t speak well of American media.
Foreign affairs was not supposed to be George W. Bush’s “thing.” September 11 presented him with some appalling choices. In the ensuing days, he spoke several times of his “mission” to confront terrorism, that this is what he had been “chosen” for, that he had found his “destiny.” Given his deep religious streak, that should be taken literally. The catch-22 is that in going after Saddam Hussein, there is considerable risk of creating more terrorists. On February 5, 2003, a deputy director in the North Korean foreign ministry told The Guardian that North Korea is entitled to launch a preemptive strike against the United States. “The United States says that after Iraq, we are next,” said Ri Pyong-gap, “but we have our own countermeasures. Preemptive attacks are not the exclusive right of the U.S.” Oops. This rather ominous indication that the notion of “preemptive war” might