The Senate Intelligence Committee recently showed how the Central Intelligence Agency grossly mishandled information about WMD in pre-war Iraq. Before the war the C.I.A. interviewed several relatives of Iraqi scientists, all of whom described the Iraqi weapons programs as decidedly inactive. The C.I.A. then sat on this information, even as President Bush publicly decried Saddam Hussein and the imminent nuclear threat he posed.
So now when you see the headlines, the resemblance they bear to any number of Tom Clancy novels is more than a little scary: C.I.A. IS MUM ON CRUCIAL INFO ABOUT WMD IN IRAQ. These are potent, heady words. And at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I think they mean much more than they actually say.
I think the C.I.A. withheld the information at least in part because they didn't want to tell the boss something he didn't want to hear. They knew the president and his close associates were hell-bent on going to war with Iraq. That was clear. But their reasons for war were sketchy. Perhaps they wanted to invade Iraq for oil, revenge or maybe something nobler like democracy. But whatever the reasons may have been-noble or ignoble-the fact remains they were not what we thought they were.
We did not go to war to nation-build and we did not go to war to depose a ruthless dictator. Instead, we waged what was billed as a preemptively defensive war to diffuse a ticking time bomb, Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein with ties to Osama bin Laden and the World Trade Center attacks.
Now some two years later, bipartisan congressional committees have almost entirely discredited those original justifications for war. Both the 9-11 Panel and the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to find any evidence of WMD in Iraq or any link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in the attacks on the Twin Towers.
So the rhetoric we heard about weapons of mass destruction and the Hussein-bin Laden junta was either a pretext for war or a colossal mistake resulting in war. In either case, we were wrong to attack. The fact is, Bush and his cronies shot first and explained later, and now people are dead and dying because of it. We are in Iraq today not because Saddam was an imminent threat to our way of life but because certain lies were told, and certain others were allowed to be told, and because we as a free public refuse to know or really care about it.
So far, the brunt of the guilt lies with the Bush administration. But if we continue to sit on the facts as they come to light, making excuses for our elected leaders when we should be making them account, we too will be complicit in the deaths of innocent people.
Ryan McIlvain
McIlvain is a student from the Boston area studying journalism.