Polemics

Blaming Iraq First

This summer retired General Wesley Clark appeared on Meet the Press to discuss his candidacy and evaluate the situation in Iraq. When asked to comment on possible intelligence failures, Clark traced them back to the earliest days of the war on terrorism: “I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, ‘You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.’ I said, ‘But—I’m willing to say it but what’s your evidence?’ And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had—Middle East think tanks and people like this and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made.”

“Middle East think tanks and people like this”? Sounds suspiciously like one of those innumerable bastions of neoconservatism. One likely candidate is the Project for the New American Century, a nexus of neoconservative intellectuals, editorialists, and policy-makers who wrote a letter to President Bush—just nine days after September 11—urging him to make regime change in Iraq a top priority. And, like Clark’s mysterious caller, the letter expresses little concern over evidence: “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”

Equally as culpable is the American Enterprise Institute. On September 18, the Institute’s Michael Ledeen, Resident Scholar in the Freedom Chair, declared that the “real threat” was not al Qaeda but “Iraq, Iran, and the others.” Not to be outdone, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs issued a press release on September 13, calling for the Bush administration “to provide all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress,
including direct American military support, to effect a regime change in Iraq.”

Fortunately, Clark refrained from mentioning Iraq in connection with the terrorist attacks. If only the Bush administration had exercised the same restraint.