Tom Maertens
July 27, 2004
MANKATO, MINN. -- Tom Maertens: Asserting this war has made us safer won't make it so
On the campaign trail in Iowa this month, the President asserted that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, that America is safer now and will be even safer if we reelect him.
So how are we safer? If we hadn't invaded Iraq, perhaps vicious crazed Iraqis would be conducting suicide attacks on America as they were before 9/11, right?
Well, actually, no Iraqis attacked the United States before our invasion of their country, with only a single exception: Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the 12 perpetrators of the first bomb attack on the World Trade Center back in 1993, was an Iraqi.
Was there some other threat emanating from Baghdad? The administration stampeded the U.S. Congress by claiming that Saddam had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could attack us with chemical or biological weapons. Not true.
What about Iraq's ties to terrorists? Saddam had no operational ties to Al-Qaida, and even the president acknowledged that Saddam had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.
The president's fallback position is that Saddam was a "madman" who could somehow threaten us in the future. Saddam was many things, including a vicious thug, but he does not appear to have been so irrational as to attack the United States. More fundamentally, he did not have the capability to do so.
If there was no threat emanating from Iraq, then it stands to reason that nothing we have done in Iraq since the invasion has made us safer.
Public opinion polls show that more than half of Americans believe the invasion has actually increased the threat. There really are "vicious crazed Iraqis" now who are willing to blow themselves up to vent their rage at us. It has to do with the 10,000 civilian deaths and 40,000 to 50,000 wounded the country has suffered.
Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri are still at large and allegedly planning to attack us. The acting director of central intelligence warns that the threat is the worst since 9/11. Obviously, the invasion of Iraq has not lessened the threat from Al-Qaida, either.
The Bush administration's arguments to the contrary are just more fiction from an administration that has publicized one sorry fabrication after another to justify the attack on Iraq: mobile BW labs that didn't exist; aluminum tubes that were not for separating plutonium, as the administration asserted; documents about yellowcake uranium from Niger that were shown to be crude forgeries; and the fleet of UAVs that proved imaginary.
The most egregious and convenient fabrication, however, is that invading Iraq was necessary to win the War on Terror. The invasion has done nothing to defeat terrorism or bin Laden. In reality, the goal of defeating "terror" is mission impossible. Terror is a concept and a tactic used by desperate people and has been employed for centuries. Suicide bombers will be a fact of life as far ahead as we can see. They've targeted us because of U.S. policies in the Middle East.
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq has squandered American lives and treasure, divided the country, and damaged our reputation in the world. No matter how many times the president asserts that the war has made us safer, it's not true.
Tom Maertens served on the White House NSC staff under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush