One Year Later…

A year ago today, we saw the open­ing salvos of Oper­a­tion Iraqi Freedom.

War erupted Wednes­day night as the United States launched dozens of Tom­a­hawk cruse mis­siles and aimed 2,000-pound bombs at Iraqi leader Sad­dam Hus­sein and other “lead­er­ship tar­gets” in Bagh­dad. The strike was aimed as “decap­i­tat­ing” Saddam’s regime and specif­i­cally tar­geted him, his two sons and other senior lead­ers of the Baath party and Iraqi Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mand Coun­cil, accord­ing to a senior Bush offi­cial.
Pres­i­dent Bush, address­ing the nation from the Oval Office about 45 min­utes after the first attacks said, “On my orders, coali­tion forces have begun strik­ing selected tar­gets of mil­i­tary impor­tance to under­mine Sad­dam Hussein’s abil­ity to wage war.”

– Knight-Ridder Newspapers

(You can read Bush’s Oval Office address from last year here. What we know now…) Moments before the cam­era began broad­cast­ing to the nation, Knight-Ridder reports that Bush pumped his fist and said, “Feels good.” B2I was busy.
A year later, how­ever, things don’t feel so good.

The inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq, his admin­is­tra­tion pre­dicted, would come at lit­tle finan­cial cost and would mate­ri­ally improve the lives of Iraqis. Amer­i­cans would be greeted as lib­er­a­tors, Bush offi­cials pre­dicted, and the top­pling of Sad­dam Hus­sein would spread peace and democ­racy through­out the Mid­dle East. Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evi­dence that the eco­nomic lives of Iraqis are improv­ing, thanks to an infu­sion of U.S. and for­eign cap­i­tal. But the admin­is­tra­tion badly under­es­ti­mated the finan­cial cost of the occu­pa­tion and seri­ously over­stated the ease of paci­fy­ing Iraq and the warmth of the recep­tion Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democ­racy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the oppo­site effect.

On the major plus side, Sad­dam Hus­sein and his pig­gish sons are cap­tured and dead, respec­tively. The peo­ple of Iraq have a future, but of what kind remains to be seen. But the ratio­nales for going to war have been proven — every one — to be trans­par­ently wrong and/or fraud­u­lent. There were no ter­ror ties. There were no WMDs, nor the abil­ity to pro­duce them. There was no threat to the region because Sad­dam was effec­tively caged. Mean­while, the real prob­lem, Pak­istan, has been shown to be promis­cu­ous with its nuclear tech­nol­ogy. Its chief nuclear sci­en­tist, A.Q. Khan, was par­doned with nary a peep from the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. In fact, Pak­istan had its ally sta­tus upgraded, open­ing the door to new weapons sales! Hey, guys: The Pak­istani ISI is not your friend. They like Osama.
And speak­ing of Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri seems to have slipped the net the Pak­ista­nis were attempt­ing to draw around him for the last two days.

The fren­zied spec­u­la­tion was trig­gered by the sight­ing of a for­eigner being whisked away at high speed in a bullet-proof vehi­cle Tues­day when para­mil­i­tary units were search­ing for tribes­men wanted for shel­ter­ing Al Qaeda fugi­tives. The vehi­cle burst out of a tribal com­pound, two oth­ers emerged to pro­tect it, and scores of fight­ers appeared from sev­eral direc­tions, hurl­ing grenades and fir­ing at the Pak­istani troops.
The entire unit of 50 troops was “vir­tu­ally wiped out,” the offi­cial said. Fif­teen were killed, 22 were injured and another 13 are still missing.

Back in Wash­ing­ton, Bush addressed the nation today and, in typ­i­cal form, 1) made no dis­tinc­tion between the war against al Qaeda and Iraq; 2) refused to acknowl­edge that the job in Afghanistan is incom­plete and that the Tal­iban con­trol a third of the coun­try, again; 3) implied that Spain, South Korea and oth­ers who are recon­sid­er­ing their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Iraqi adven­ture are appeas­ing bin Laden and 4) while admit­ting that his poli­cies have split tra­di­tional alliances and alien­ated friends, papered over the depths to which the U.S. has fallen in the eyes of many. “There have been dis­agree­ments in this mat­ter, among old and val­ued friends,” he said. “Those dif­fer­ences belong to the past. All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dic­ta­tor has removed a source of vio­lence, aggres­sion, and insta­bil­ity in the Mid­dle East.”
Can we? Actu­ally, the biggest source of insta­bil­ity is the Israeli-Palestinian prob­lem, which some in the White House said the Iraq war would solve. It’s worse than ever with Bush hav­ing done lit­tle to push it for­ward. His “roadmap” is in tat­ters because of Bush’s unwill­ing­ness to stand up to Ariel Sharon and his set­tle­ment plans.
“Who would pre­fer that Saddam’s tor­ture cham­bers still be open?” Bush asked. “Who would wish that more mass graves were still being filled? Who would begrudge the Iraqi peo­ple their long-awaited lib­er­a­tion?”
Well, no one is. What’s being begrudged is the way Bush screwed up the march to war in the United Nations, the lack of post-war plan­ning and the sheer arro­gance the White House has shown to any­one who dis­agrees with them. When John Kerry said more/foreign lead­ers sup­ported his can­di­dacy, it was a gaffe not because it isn’t true, but because it is.
So good on ya, Mr. Pres­i­dent, that Sad­dam is gone. And I sin­cerely mean that. I was in Iraq in July 2002 and saw the front between the Kurds and the Iraqi troops. I talked with sur­vivors of the Hal­abja mas­sacre. I met with fam­i­lies who had fled Kirkuk when Sad­dam “Ara­bized” them out of their homes. I was there dur­ing the war, and saw how happy many Iraqis — Kurds and Arabs alike — were that Sad­dam was gone.
But things are not going well now, and that’s mostly your fault, Mr. Pres­i­dent. I didn’t oppose the war in Iraq because I’m a paci­fist — I whole­heart­edly sup­ported Afghanistan. And I didn’t oppose it because I’m a sup­porter of tyrants. I opposed it because it was poorly planned from the get-go, cyn­i­cally sold to the Amer­i­can peo­ple, alien­at­ing to Amer­i­can allies and a dis­trac­tion from the real enemy — al Qaeda and its con­stel­la­tion of ter­ror groups. You have yet to con­vince me that top­pling Sad­dam was worth the deaths of 676 coali­tion troops and thou­sands of Iraqi con­scripts and civil­ians despite the imme­di­ate ben­e­fits of the war. A year later, I’m not alone in still wrestling with this conun­drum, and your sim­ple black and white, “no neu­tral ground” state­ments don’t make the issue any clearer.
“Feels good”? It didn’t then, and it doesn’t now.

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