Posted on: Monday, May 19, 2003

EDITORIAL
Remind us: exactly why are we in Iraq?

The chaos that has attended the first weeks of American occupation of Iraq is feeding a spreading puzzlement here on the home front. It's becoming increasingly difficult to square our stated war aims with the apparent priorities now at work on the ground there.

First and foremost, we went to war because, we were told, Iraq was an active menace to the United States and its interests. Its weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological and nuclear, were described as weapons aimed and cocked.

It appears more and more likely that capabilities of this sort may well have existed, but as potential, rather than mobilized, threats. But the expert teams sent to find them have broken camp and gone home empty-handed.

Meanwhile, it's puzzling that U.S. forces waited weeks to secure well-known storage sites for nuclear materials — just the stuff for so-called "dirty bombs" — that instead were subjected to looting.

Second, the Bush administration argued that regime change was required because Saddam Hussein was a genocidal tyrant. His brutal record, in general terms, was already well known. But now grisly mass graves, small and large, are being turned up all over Iraq. That cements the case that he was a criminal of the worst sort.

But it's difficult to imagine why U.S. forces haven't rushed to secure these horrific finds, for two reasons:

Frenzied digging by relatives jeopardizes reliable identification and intact, dignified reburial of remains. And the forensic evidence needed to identify and prosecute genocidal criminals is being hopelessly lost.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, the record is quite the opposite.

Third, the goal of establishing a popular, secular democracy in Iraq, now mired in chaos and confusion, is off to a dubious beginning, to say the least.

Are Iraqis better off now? Consider this telling dispatch from Baghdad:

"This is not a country in anarchy," said Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, who was speaking "with gunshots echoing outside and black smoke from a looted building in the distance."

Now Bremer is learning to his consternation that it's nearly impossible to find Iraqis with needed skills who aren't Baath Party members.

Finally, the most awkward of U.S. war aims, that the defeat of Iraq was an integral part of the war on terrorism, lies in tatters.

Claims of links between al-Qaida and Saddam were discredited before the war. But the latest bombings of Western quarters in Saudi Arabia and the imminent threat in Kenya suggest that the defeat of Iraq did little to reduce the threat to Americans from terrorism, and indeed may have been a distraction from that pursuit.

It appears the administration was into wishful thinking only weeks ago when it said al-Qaida was on its last legs and on the run.

Meanwhile the administration is moving at flank speed to get U.N. sanctions lifted so that it can administer Iraqi oil (unlike hospitals, public buildings and museums, the Oil Ministry was secured the day U.S. troops entered Baghdad). And it's leveraging its newfound strategic foothold in the Middle East in dealings with the Palestinians, Iran, Syria, Russia and others.

While these have not been stated war aims, they clearly are spoils of the war.