Great, I thought. I have been wondering why we were in Iraq.
I’m grateful that we won the war so decisively once we decided to go in. I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone. As an American, I am proud of the job our fighting men and women did. I rejoiced when we got our POWs back. It’s a thrill to see Iraqis in some places welcoming us as liberators — however long that might last .
But I still had received no persuasive answer to the original question I asked last Jan. 27 in a column headlined, “Explain Again: Why Are We Going to War?”
So I opened the e-mail and clicked on a hyperlink. And what should unfold before my wondering eyes but a lengthy, masterfully produced slide show consisting of dozens of powerful photographic images appearing and disappearing on my screen. It went on for several minutes.
And what were they images of? Underground desert factories cranking out nerve gas? Fiendish Iraqi scientists splitting atoms and building MIRV warheads? Smallpox canisters being loaded into howitzers? Wasn’t that, after all, why we said we were going into Iraq — because Saddam was bent on obtaining weapons of mass destruction?
But no. The images turned out to be more than 18 months old. They depicted the gut-wrenching events of Sept. 11, 2001, and its aftermath: planes flying into towers, towers collapsing, people running for their lives, dust-caked survivors, dead firemen, flames leaping out of the Pentagon, flags being raised amid the rubble, and so on.
I sat there, riveted, as the pictures marched before me, each one dissolving into the next. Their cumulative effect was to arouse again just a little of the feeling of horror and disbelief we all felt when those events were so appallingly fresh and vivid.
It is probably good to be reminded of all this every once in a while, I thought — lest we forget the enormity of the crime that was committed against us on that blackest of days.
Then I looked up at the subject line again. Wait a minute. What did that say up there? “‘Why We Are in Afghanistan”?
No. The words were, “Why We Are in Iraq.”
So what you’re saying (whoever you are out there in Internet Land) is that we went halfway around the world and invaded and conquered another sovereign nation because a terrible thing happened in our country a year and a half ago. So I guess there must be a close connection between the two events, right?
Well, not really. If any convincing evidence has surfaced suggesting that Saddam’s Iraq had anything much to do with the 9/11 terrorists (most of whom were from Saudi Arabia), no one has come forward with it yet. And if it were there, I’m sure somebody would have. For that matter, we haven’t found any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, either, unless you count a couple of vials of smelly stuff that may have been insecticide.
What the video seems to offer, then, is a very dramatic, effective answer to some other question than the one it purports to address. It represents a breathtaking triumph of emotion over reason. The thinking behind it strikes me as an awfully dangerous kind of attitude to base a foreign policy on.
And now we’re going around making alarmingly reckless threats to Syria, which is apparently next on our hit list. You get the idea that somebody, somewhere, has a vision of a new Rome — sending out its legions to impose a Pax Americana on the rest of the world.
Here’s the irony of it: I’m all for doing whatever it takes to avenge 9/11 and prevent a repeat. Shoot the bastards. Bomb them. Pack them off to Guantanamo. And if they don’t get due process, tough. But what we have done in Iraq, slick videos aside, doesn’t advance our goal of fighting terrorism.
Indeed, I fear it has had precisely the opposite effect.
Why? Because the TV shots of invading Yankee infidels cruising the streets of Baghdad in Bradley fighting vehicles have galvanized a whole new generation of America-haters out there across several continents. The most chilling words I’ve heard come out of this war so far were spoken by the Arab observer who said, “Where you had one Osama bin Laden before, you’ll have a hundred now.”
Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at (910) 693-2470 or via e-mail at sbouser@thepilot.com.
