THE WANDERER, July 31, 2003
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
From Apocalypse to Anticlimax
The Bush administration is celebrating the latest
and perhaps last spectacular turn in the war in Iraq: the
killing, in a shootout, of Saddam Hussein's two sons,
Uday and Qusay. They will not be missed by many of their
countrymen.
Both were ruthless and cruel, but Uday, the elder,
was a fiend whose crimes it is painful even to recite. A
brief newspaper profile of him reminded me of Suetonius's
description of the Roman emperor Caligula; you wonder how
a human being could bear to inflict such pain on others,
let alone enjoy doing it. But Uday Hussein was, if
anything, even crueler than Caligula. He once showed up
at a friend's wedding and raped the bride. The groom
killed himself on the spot. The bride later turned up
dead too. And this is only one of many, many stories,
some of them even more appalling.
The world is well rid of this pair. There are no
adequate words for such depravity. Emotionally, the
crimes of such rulers may seem to justify not only
rebellion, but war. But the fact remains that their evil,
unspeakable though it was, posed no threat to the United
States.
Atrocity stories, often true enough, usually fuel
war fever. The real question is not their truth, but
their relevance. This culmination of the war on Iraq has
nothing to do with the event that triggered it: the
concerted terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Nobody will ever forget the mood of the weeks and
months that followed. Because of its media impact, it was
the most shocking event in American history, if only
because Pearl Harbor occurred before news was televised:
We all witnessed 9/11.
We struggled to make sense of it. Before 9/11,
"terrorism" was a remote phenomenon, a Mideast thing.
Suddenly it was *here.* Why? The media were full of
analyses and explanations -- of Islam, al-Qaeda, the
"roots" of terrorism, the "rogue nations" that sponsored
it. Where would the terrorists strike next? If they could
destroy our greatest skyscrapers in a flash, what else
might they be capable of? Could they get their hands on
nuclear weapons? Nothing horrible seemed impossible.
Nearly everyone agreed that the government must do
something. Bush pledged an all-out war on terrorism,
including resolute action against its abettors: The
terrorists weren't states, but states would be held
responsible -- first Afghanistan, then Iraq.
It soon transpired that people within the
administration, as well as many journalists, had already
been looking for an occasion to resume war on Iraq,
making plans for it years before 9/11. They were quick to
see their opportunity, and an enormous propaganda
offensive against Iraq began.
We were warned that Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction -- chemical, biological, and possibly
nuclear. He was also suspected of links to terrorists,
with whom he might share these weapons. He was capable of
striking the United States and its allies at any time --
within 45 minutes, according to British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. The administration even spoke of "mushroom
clouds."
But what if Iraq had had nothing to do with 9/11?
This idea was quickly dismissed, even though al-Qaeda
openly despised Saddam Hussein and other Arab rulers as
apostate Muslims. Some of the war advocates treated the
entire Islamic world as the enemy, making no distinction
between devout Muslims and secularized apostates. Bush
carefully called Islam a "religion of peace," but he
broadened the enemy to include even North Korea in the
"axis of evil."
Still, Iraq was the chief target. Bush would settle
for nothing less than "regime change," promising to
replace Saddam Hussein's despotism with democracy, while
predicting that Hussein's downfall would lead to a wave
of democratization throughout the entire Mideast. Hussein
was hiding "weapons of mass destruction," refusing to
admit it, defying United Nations resolutions. Bush
claimed the authority to resume the war his father had
waged in 1991, never formally declared or concluded.
Opinion polls showed that he enjoyed strong popular
support.
This spring, still using the emotional momentum of
9/11, he launched the war on Iraq. Victory came quickly,
and Bush celebrated by appearing publicly in a combat
pilot's garb. Everything seemed to have gone according to
plan. The U.S. occupation of Iraq commenced.
Unexpectedly Vulnerable?
Given all this, the apocalyptic atmosphere of the
pre-war months has dissipated with remarkable rapidity,
giving way to a sense of anticlimax. Victory came easily,
almost too easily. The weapons of mass destruction never
appeared, even when Hussein was fighting for his very
survival. He failed to use them even within his own
country, let alone against the continental U.S. No trace
of them has turned up.
The occupation is not going well. Attacking Iraq
proved easier than actually governing it, and American
soldiers are being picked off by Iraqi snipers at a slow
but steady and demoralizing rate. It is clear that Iraq
was never the threat Bush insisted it was.
Bush's own veracity has come into question. He has
awkwardly abandoned his charge that Iraq sought to buy
uranium in Africa, and it is widely suspected that he
misused the data he received from the CIA and other
intelligence agencies in order to exaggerate the peril.
His real problem is not that his antiwar critics
have been proven right, but that he has created general
doubt about the reliability of his own word. Lies,
exaggerations, bad intelligence, bad judgment -- it
hardly matters. It's sinking in that the war was simply
unnecessary, and has left Americans neither better off
nor safer than they were before.
So, contrary to what even the Democrats have
assumed, the overwhelming victory may not be a great
political plus for him as he seeks reelection next year.
Like his father in 1992, he could find himself
unexpectedly vulnerable.
What about terrorism? In striking contrast to the
months immediately after 9/11, the problem seems to have
disappeared, even as a journalistic topic. Al-Qaeda
hasn't been heard from for many months, and Osama bin
Laden seems to have retired even from the audiotape
business. The brief Afghan war may have disrupted al-
Qaeda's operations, but even the administration doesn't
claim that the Iraq war has made any difference to
whatever terrorist network may still exist. It now
describes its objectives in Iraq in terms of liberation
and democracy, not defeating terrorism.
It's hard to say what the real purpose of the Iraq
war was, if there was a steady purpose at all. No
strategy is evident. To charge that it was "all about
oil" may be to give Bush and his inner circle too much
credit for lucidity. Their aims seem to have shifted as
circumstances changed. But fighting terrorism appears to
have become a low priority, as if they have forgotten why
all this started less than two years ago.
At the time, in his first major speech after 9/11,
Bush warned that the war on terrorism might take years,
and though he promised ultimate victory, that we might
never know when we had won. He neglected to warn that we
might forget why we were fighting. But that appears to be
what has happened.
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