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.
Unilateral Nation
You know the Bush team is in trouble when it is asking the United Nations for help. On September 23, President Bush delivered a wandering speech at the United Nations General Assembly that managed to cover everything from terrorism in Casablanca to the international sex trade and the AIDS epidemic. The presentation was part of a two-day “charm offensive” designed to warm the United Nations up to the idea of sending its own international force into Iraq.
Bush remains adamant that he invaded Iraq to defend the “credibility of the United Nations.” And now he is asking the United Nations to save the integrity of the United States. Yet in making his Faustian bargain Bush is only further compromising his credibility. For this institution explicitly rejected Bush’s war rationale when it refused to commit military forces to the Iraq invasion. And then earlier this month, Hans Blix—the former United Nations chief weapons inspector—reiterated this position on CNN: “With this long period, I’m inclined to think that the Iraqi statement that they destroyed all the biological and chemical weapons, which they had in the summer of 1991, may well be the truth.” If Bush and the United Nations cannot even agree on the reasons for the war, how can they expect to cooperate on the way to end it?
