Home > Bush has misled Americans on Iraq
The congressional commission investigating the September
11, 2001 attacks on the US has concluded that there is
no evidence to support the Bush administration’s thesis
that Saddam Hussein helped Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda
organisation carry them out. This conclusion, emerging
from a strong tradition of congressional oversight,
could be taken further.
The evidence the administration produced to demonstrate
the link was, at best, spurious, at worst, fabricated.
This is not a small matter, especially in the context of
the Bush team’s case for its war of choice against Iraq.
The first public justification for the war was that the
Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction
with which he could dominate his neighbours and threaten
the west. This was always an exaggeration. There was
some reason to believe he had residual chemical and
biological weapons, but none whatsoever to suggest he
had reconstituted a nuclear arms programme. As we now
know, no WMD of any description have been found; not one
US assertion to the United Nations Security Council by
Colin Powell, secretary of state, in February last year,
has been substantiated.
The second public justification - which was wheeled on
stage to distract the audience from the embarrassing
absence of WMD - was that the war was about freeing
Iraqis and, indeed, the Middle East from tyranny. After
Falluja and Abu Ghraib, however, 92 per cent of Iraqis
regard US troops as occupiers, while 2 per cent see them
as liberators, according to a Coalition Provisional
Authority poll.
Yet there was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD
fears, or ignoble about opposition to Saddam’s tyranny -
however late Washington developed this. The purported
link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, by contrast, was
never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region.
It was and is nonsense, the sort of "intelligence" true
believers in the Bush camp lapped up from clever
charlatans they sponsored such as the now disgraced
Ahmad Chalabi. Yet, even this week, vice-president Dick
Cheney continues to assert Saddam had "long-established
ties with al-Qaeda".
No wonder that, until recently, polls regularly showed
more than half of Americans believed Iraq was behind the
attack on New York’s twin towers.
Whether the Osama and Saddam thesis was more the result
of self-delusion or cynical manipulation, it - along
with Washington’s mismanagement of the whole Iraqi
adventure - has been enormously damaging.
The Bush administration has misled the American people.
It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and
commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in
Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of
death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it
inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating
the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the
clear and present danger.