President Bush's cocktail of fear

The Pentagon released a report this week stating that there were no direct ties between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda. While this information isn’t entirely new, it does officially seal the case against the Bush Administration and further exposes the treachery that led us to war. In his famous Mission Accomplished speech President Bush reminded Americans on why we had to invade Iraq:

We have removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime is no more.

This argument -- that Iraq had WMD and “connections” to al-Qaeda -- was one Americans heard over and over in 2002, and because it met no opposition -- not from Democrats or the media -- it blazed the road to war. However, both these arguments were entirely fictional. Iraq was never an ally of al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime was not developing, stockpiling, or amassing weapons of mass destruction. This was all part of the Bush Administration’s cocktail of fear -- claim Iraq is developing poison gases, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons; that they are plotting with al-Qaeda; that time was against us; that a “mushroom cloud” may blossom over a U.S city -- and the American people drank it right up.

So while it surely served the Administration's purpose to portray Iraq as a nation arming for war and threatening the peace of the entire world, the reality was far different. At the conclusion of the first Gulf War the United Nations imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq that stifled its economy and impoverished its people. For instance, by 1999 the U.N. estimated that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians had died due to the sanctions, perhaps a half million were children. Iraqis lacked basic sanitation and access to medical care. UNICEF reported that 4500 children under the age of five were dying each month from hunger and disease. The sanctions ultimately were responsible for creating a famine in Iraq that probably killed millions. Such facts belie any suggestion that Iraq was a threat to the United States. How can a nation that cannot even feed its own people threaten the world's remaining super-power?

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has a new book about Iraq called the Three Trillion Dollar War. Of course, it would probably be more accurate to call it the Three Trillion Dollar Scam. The belief that a poor, starving and impoverished nation could threaten this country, or the belief that occupying Iraq would be in our national interests has to be one of the most costliest scams in history. So far, no one has been held accountable for this scam, which also shows that it is one of the greatest crimes in history.