November 10, 2003 - My thoughts on Iraq

I've been against the war in Iraq from the very beginning, so it should be no surprise that I want to point out a couple of ironies of the current occupation. Everyone points out the big ironies that we haven't found weapons of mass destruction, and that more soldiers have died since Bush declared it over than died up to that point. Hopefully these two that I'm going to point out are a little unique. I haven't heard anybody talking about these issues, and that's exactly why I wanted to point them out here.

I'll start with a little bit of my background thoughts about the war. I am, and have been since this first came up, one of those people who believe that Bush had some motivation to attack Iraq other than what was presented to the public. Some people have confronted me with "Well then what IS the motivation?", and that's exactly my point. I don't KNOW what the real motivation is, and that's what bothered me from the beginning. Whether hawks want to admit it or not, the main motivation given for attacking Iraq was that Saddam didn't like America, and he had weapons of mass destruction that he was bound to use on America as soon as he could. I had many debates with people over why we didn't find the weapons, and over whether or not Saddam had cooperated with the United Nations inspectors.

My point long before the war actually started was that Saddam HAD started to cooperate. I never denied that he was a bad man. I never denied that he had denied the U.N. inspectors access for the previous 12 years, or that he was wrong to do so. My argument was always that in 2002, when there was so much talk about attacking, Saddam WAS cooperating with the U.N. inspectors. They were allowed to do surprise inspections, and were allowed to go anywhere. Sure, there was some debate about Saddam's palaces. Saddam felt like those places could be excluded because they were...almost sacred. But the U.N. and America were correct to push, and Saddam relented. Some people said that illegal weapons HAD been found during those inspections, but those were people who were looking for an excuse to go to war. No illegal weapons were found, and the few that were questionable were destroyed as requested. I always believed that if the United States really had the proof of illegal weapons they claimed they did, they would have been jumping up and down waving that proof in the world's face, and since we never did that, I doubted that we really "knew" there were illegal weapons. Still, nobody denied that there probably were illegal weapons somewhere - even me.

So then the problem became whether to act immediately or to let the U.N. inspectors try to finish their jobs. I heard different figures for how much time the U.N. wanted, everywhere from 4 months to a year. I personally would have given them that year, and yes I think if we truly believed Saddam was such a big threat, we should have been willing to keep our troops waiting in the area for that long. With this suggestion, I am often confronted with the question of what I would have done if a year had gone by and they still hadn't found anything, the suggestion of course being that I would let Saddam play games with us indefinitely, until he had his nuclear bombs finished and killed millions of people. Well I can't say how I would react, because it would of course depend on what happened over that year. If Saddam continued to cooperate, and the United Nations and the world felt they were allowed to do their jobs, and still nothing was found after a year, I would obviously have to question whether there actually were any weapons. On the other hand, if somewhere in the midst of these inspections, Saddam started playing games again, I would be more supportive of an attack - as, I believe, would the United Nations and the world.

So here we are a year later. We didn't leave our troops to sit and wait; We sent them in to killand die and wait. We didn't let the United Nations do their job; We alienated the U.N. and the world. We didn't find the illegal weapons, although Fox News was thrilled to tell us all about the Scuds that were shot, which turned out not to be, or about the chemical weapon plants we found, which turned out not to be.

So okay, those points are thorns in the government's side, but what about the two unique ironies that I wanted to point out?

1. The hawks have pointed out that Iraq probably hid the weapons of mass destruction, and so it will take time to find them. Sometimes they even suggest that Saddam may have destroyed them before the war, "so they wouldn't be found". The irony in that? That's exactly what was supposed to have happened! The U.N. inspectors asked for TIME to find the weapons, just like we are asking for time to find the weapons. Iraq kept telling us the weapons had been destroyed, just like we are telling the world now.

2. This is also being pushed as part of the war on terror. Everyone has pointed out the obvious irony that there are now far more terrorists in Iraq than there were before the war, but there's another irony that I think is interesting. Bush's new policy of preemptive strikes and all that is supposed to be the new strategy because it's a new kind of war. But now that we're in there, we seem totally helpless to fight against terrorists. Every day, more troops are killed by car bombs and suicide bombs. These are the tools of terrorists, and here we are in the middle of a war against terrorists, and we have no idea how to handle it.

Why are we there, if we don't know what we're doing?