COMMENTARY
War against Iraq

By Oliver Lee

When President Bush maneuvered us into war against Iraq last spring, he and his advisers swore up and down that Saddam Hussein at the time possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and would no doubt use them against us. Vice President Dick Cheney one day even said, in his authoritative way, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Ever since the 9-11 catastrophes, the American people have felt the nation to be vulnerable as never before. They were ready to believe White House claims about terrorism emanating from both Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus after the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the American people, as well as Congress, approved the president's launching of pre-emptive war against Iraq.

So this superpower smashed its way into Iraq, toppled Saddam's regime while killing several thousand civilians by way of "collateral damage," and occupied the hapless country with 140,000 troops, albeit ineffectually.

For more than four months now, a team of 1,400 scientists and intelligence experts has searched hundreds of sites where the White House had asserted it knew for sure the weapons were stored. Absolutely none has been found.

Before long, Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz began back-pedaling on the question of weapons of mass destruction. He said they had not been the real reason for invading Iraq, but that their menace had been portrayed to the public because within the administration this was the only reason that all the agencies and departments could agree upon.

The Bush league's latest shameless moving of the goal posts, for about the sixth time, takes the form of declaring that whether Saddam possessed WMDs was not really the issue, that the real danger lay in the fact that Saddam in 2003 had sought the capability of having WMDs, that he had kept a coterie of scientists whom he would have put to work at some time in the future to try to make them.

So said Undersecretary of State John Bolton on Sept. 4. And Cheney on Sept. 14 claimed there was evidence of Saddam's "aspirations" to build nuclear weapons.

Today, about 24 percent of Americans still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Saddam did have WMDs at the time of the U.S. attack. For them, this is enough retroactive justification for the invasion, and the White House speculation about Saddam's hoping to acquire WMDs is irrelevant.

But this latest White House dodge does serve an important purpose, namely to provide for the majority of the people, for whom the absence of WMDs has been obvious, an alternative rationale for the war, feeble though it be. It is to them that the White House is saying, "forget about the WMDs, they're not that important. Just keep in mind that Saddam had evil intentions."

The question then arises: If the Bush crowd is justifying the invasion with this focus on what Saddam's intentions are said to have been, why didn't they make this argument in the first place and save themselves all the embarrassment, month after agonizing month, of not being able to find any WMDs, and having to invent new justifications all the time?

The answer is that the majority of the American people and their Congress would have refused to go to war for the dubious cause of blocking Saddam's mere "aspirations," and in defiance of the United Nations and violation of international law to boot.

But if I am right about this, then how to explain the reality of the American people not rejecting out of hand the administration's recent raising of this dubious banner?

Part of the answer is that with the United States being six months into this war, with more than 300 lives of its soldiers lost, several thousand wounded, tens of billions of dollars spent, American prestige having been laid on the line, the American people, even those who had opposed going to war in the first place, find it difficult to think of abandoning the war in mid-stream.

Thus, 74 percent say "the United States has the responsibility to remain in Iraq as long as necessary until there is a stable government." The simplistic argument is, "now that we're in there, we have to finish it; we can't just pull out." Only 12 percent favor pulling out U.S. troops altogether.

Yet there are strong and rising misgivings about having gone to war. Whereas in mid-April 76 percent of Americans believed Iraq was worth going to war over, that percentage declined to 63 in late August, and to 58 by mid-September.

The guerrilla warfare realities in Iraq being what they are, and our prospects for success becoming dimmer by the week, American public support for the war inexorably will continue to erode. Popular pressure for pulling out will steadily increase despite the administration's incessant fancy footwork. In due time the pressure will become irresistible.

It has happened before, most notably in Vietnam. After the first three years of America's war there, a much greater investment of blood and treasure and prestige had been made than what the American people will ever allow to be made in Iraq. And yet the White House saw fit to de-escalate and eventually to withdraw altogether.

What America did before in an illegal and immoral and hopeless war, it can do again in the illegal and hopeless occupation of Iraq.

Oliver Lee is Affiliate Graduate Faculty at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.