Posted on: Wednesday, June 2, 2004

VOLCANIC ASH
Accountability needed on Iraq

By David Shapiro

I took flak from liberal friends when I favored Republican positions on several issues in the 2002 Hawai'i election.

"How can you sell out to conservatives?" they'd demand.

"This has nothing to do with liberals vs. conservatives," I'd answer. "It's about holding Democrats accountable for years of dishonesty and incompetence. Honesty, competence and accountability aren't partisan issues."

My reaction is the same when conservative friends question my patriotism for criticizing President Bush on his war in Iraq.

This is about patriotism only in the sense that it's the patriotic duty of all Americans, whatever their politics, to demand fair accountability for presidential dishonesty in provoking this war and incompetence in delivering his promised result of making Americans safer from terrorism.

Bush has led us into a Vietnam-like quagmire by foolishly initiating a conflict in which we had no compelling national interest, and then leaving us mired there with no honorable way out.

If we stay the course, many more Americans will die trying to enforce a peace that may prove impossible.

If we depart, we dishonor ourselves by leaving behind a religious and ethnic bloodbath. In the chaos, terrorists would gain an oil-rich haven far beyond what they enjoyed in Afghanistan.

It's clear that Bush and key members of his administration had Iraq on the brain before Sept. 11, 2001, and used the terrorist attacks to cover what they were aching to do in Iraq all along.

Against all cautionary advice, this cocksure bunch of armchair generals plunged into a volatile situation clueless of the political, religious and cultural forces they were dealing with.

Now, they shamelessly gear every action in Iraq to the November election. They'll prop up a puppet Iraqi government ill-equipped to maintain civil order and pass it off as democracy.

They'll delay presenting the bill for the ever-expanding cost of this tragic misadventure until after the election.

The president has been proved false on his claims that Saddam Hussein needed to be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida to wreak terrorism on the United States, and that brutalized Iraqis would welcome our troops as liberators.

Now, he and Republican supporters like our own Gov. Linda Lingle persist in arguing that fighting terrorists in Iraq spares us from fighting them on our own soil.

Like all the other disinformation, the opposite is true.

We're fighting the war on terrorism in the wrong place. Few international terrorists were in Iraq plotting operations against U.S. citizens until we drew them there by starting a war.

By allowing terrorists to tie us down in Iraq, we're distracted from disrupting more insidious schemes against Americans orchestrated from other countries.

The Bush administration's own warnings of possible al-Qaida strikes in the United States this summer and fall are all the evidence we need that Americans are no safer from being hit at home than before 9/11 and the Iraq war.

Imagine how much more secure we'd be if we hadn't become sidetracked in Iraq and spent a fraction of the resources we've squandered there to disrupt terrorist operations that really threaten us.

This massively expensive war will diminish our national and economic security for decades.

But the real cost was seen in the Memorial Day tributes to the more than 800 fine Americans who've lost their lives in this monumental blunder — nearly 700 of them since Bush strutted around the deck of an aircraft carrier over a year ago declaring an end to major conflict.

Dishonesty and incompetence. When do we demand accountability?

David Shapiro is a Hawai'i journalist who can be reached at dave@volcanicash.net.