Do you remember the stories we were told leading up to the conquest of Iraq? Do you remember that they said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was linked to 9/11 and Al Qeada, that we'd be heralded as liberators and not occupiers and that the war would be over in a few weeks costing a mere pittance? Remember this? Well, I was very surprised to learn that this fantasy was spelled out in its entirety just a month after 9/11.
In an editorial in the National Review Online entitled
End Iraq 10/15/01, Richard Lowry made a case for the invasion of Iraq that is very similar to the story we were told by our government. Mr. Lowry lays out two options for Iraq. The first option is to "let the fissiparous resentments of Iraq — the Kurdish north, the Sunni middle, the Shiite south — play themselves out on the theory that a hopeless muddle would be an improvement over a dangerous regime." Mr. Lowry did not advise this course of action because it did not offer a clear cut solution to end Iraq’s long-term aggressive goals. He advised "to follow instead a path that would oust the Iraqi regime quickly and be much cleaner, the U.S. should jettison half-measures and invade and occupy Iraq."
He begins his article with, “Early indications are that Iraq had a hand in the September 11 attacks. But firm evidence should be unnecessary for the U.S. to act. It doesn't take careful detective work to know that Saddam Hussein is a perpetual enemy of the United States. But it's more than a personal matter.” So according to the Neo-Conservative thinking, a link between Iraq and 9/11 was irrelevant because of the fact that we were now authorized to go to war with any country we viewed as a threat. If Mr. Lowry was tapped into the flow of neo-conservative thinking, it doesn’t take careful detective work to come to the realization that the shock and awe of 9/11 offered the Neo-Conservatives an opportunity for pushing a radical new agenda.
Mr. Lowry prophetically wrote, “The United States could pull off an invasion with the help of only Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. It would require a significant buildup, a long air campaign against all of Saddam's military assets, and finally a land invasion.” As it turns out, this is exactly what happened except that he forgot Poland. The “significant buildup” took place while our forces were engaged in the war in Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden allegedly escaped from the Tora Bora complex because we were pulling troops out of Afghanistan for Iraq. We know that the “long air campaign” against Iraq took place before war was authorized by Congress. In the Times Online, Michael Smith
wrote, “The American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began.” And finally, the land invasion featuring Shock and Awe blitzkrieg attacks from both land and air against a ramshackle army with few elite troops.
“Pre-invasion, the U.S. would work closely with some sort of Free Iraqi government, making it clear that the war was against the regime and not the Iraqi people.” The Free Iraqi government we wound up working closely with was the Iraqi National Congress led by the current Deputy Prime Minister in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi. As it turns out, Ahmed Chalabi was also instrumental in providing much of the questionable intelligence that the President claimed he based his decision to attack Iraq.
As prescient as Mr. Lowry was about our plans, he was woefully and completely wrong about his next few predictions. “American forces would probably enjoy a reception from the locals much warmer than that accorded the ROTC on many college campuses.” If by a “warmer reception” he meant the raging inferno of a nation in flames, he was dead on. However, I believe he meant Dick Cheney’s version when Dick said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” just before the start of the invasion, "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." While both turned out to be dreadfully mistaken, it’s obvious that they were definitely on the same page.
“We occupy the Balkans to very little strategic purpose, except perhaps to keep the Europeans from complaining too loudly. Why not undertake an occupation where it really matters?” Though the term occupation was not used to describe our actions, the liberation of Iraq is most certainly percieved as an occupation.
As the President stumbles across the globe claiming that he didn’t manipulate us into war, I think it’s important that we look back at what they believed was possible. They honestly believed Iraq could be shocked and awed into submission as we were shocked and awed on 9/11. Maybe they forgot to listen to their own rhetoric. They preached about what a completely evil bastard Saddam was so how could they think that the Iraqi people could be quelled by giant explosions and mammoth tanks rolling down their streets? Dick’s ravenous thirst for abuse pales in comparison to Saddam’s reign of terror so how could they think torture would break the Iraqi resistance?
What struck me as odd about this article was that it was posted so quickly after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Now, I do not believe the official story of 9/11 any more than I believe Saddam posed any sort of threat to the United States, however, at that time, I believed wholeheartedly that these fabrications were true. After 9/11, if George Bush said we needed to invade Canada, I probably would have rallied behind him but only if Canada was harboring those who perpetrated the attacks. I was under the misconception that it was those responsible for the attacks that we wanted to “smoke out”. Maybe I was too concerned with the possibility of Anthrax dust rubbing off on my junk mail but invading any country that wasn’t involved in 9/11 never crossed my mind. After reading Mr. Lowry, it seems clear that there was a bigger picture that I was not grasping at the time.
Moreso than anything else I have come across, this last paragraph clearifies, at least in my mind, how the Neo-conservatives sold this war to the different factions of the American power elite and ultimately, with much more dramatization, to the American people. "A functioning, mostly free, and relatively rich Iraq would have several advantages over Saddam's country, and over chaos: In moral terms, it would represent a great improvement in the lives of average Iraqis. It would bring strategic stability to the region, freeing the Gulf states from the constant fear of invasion. It would be an embarrassment — and perhaps a spur to change — to the rest of the corrupt regimes in the region, providing a model of free-market success. It would guarantee the West's access to oil, and perhaps help break up OPEC (the ill-gotten gains from which fund repressive dictatorships and, indirectly, terrorists). And it would be a nice economic benefit to the United States: If the Teamsters like drilling in ANWR, they should love occupying Iraq."
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