As President Bush seeks re-election, voters must remember that
he sold the U.S. public on the Iraq war by reiterating the threat
posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction ““
weapons that have yet to appear.
The WMD issue has become quite an embarrassment for the
president. The latest and most damning evidence that Bush’s
pre-war rhetoric was mostly hollow comes from David Kay, former
U.S. chief weapons inspector; Kay says Hussein did not have WMD, as
the government believed.
Now Bush is covering his tracks. He was quoted in an Associated
Press story Tuesday saying, “There is no doubt in my mind
that Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat to America and
others.” In his State of the Union address last week, Bush
said, “Had we failed to act, the dictator’s weapons of
mass destruction programs would continue to this day.”
The problem is that last year the public was told of more than
“gathering threats” and weapons building programs. Last
year the threats were imminent and the weapons were stockpiled
““ or so Bush indicated.
The president and members of his cabinet even used the image of
a mushroom cloud to plant fear in the minds of Americans to boost
domestic support for their war.
After the United States easily toppled Hussein’s
dictatorship and began exploring the California-sized country for a
biological and chemical weapons stockpile, the administration
maintained WMD would turn up ““Â eventually. But Bush and
his cronies simultaneously sought to move the center of the Iraq
war debate away from the WMD issue. They instead highlighted the
“liberation” of the Iraqi people.
Now, the administration has all but totally backed off from
their once-strong WMD claims. When probed Tuesday, Bush’s
press secretary would not repeat the oft-used line that, given
time, WMD would be found. Essentially, the administration has
abandoned its number one reason for going to war ““ its best
defense for sending hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis
to their graves.
To save face, Bush supporters ask whether the war was worth it
anyway, and if the world is better off with Hussein out of power.
But the more important question is: Is the world better off with
the invasion of Iraq? One of the world’s many dictators was
toppled. But thousands are dead and many more will still die.
Voters must not let Bush control the debate. No matter what is
said now, the war was to have been fought to end a credible threat
of Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. That’s the
reason the public received.
Stuck in a quagmire of its own, the Bush administration is
trying to drop the issue. Voters must see through the
administration’s efforts to come up with new justifications
for a war initially launched because of alleged threats we now know
did not exist.