Using 9-11 to Invade Iraq

¶ … 911 as Justification to Invade Iraq

The war in Iraq may or may not have been justified for humanitarian or ideological reasons, depending on one's perspective. American leaders who favored war with Iraq used the frightened public mood, after 9/11, to maneuver opinion toward favoring the war, supposedly for America's safety. According to "Clarke's Take on Terror"

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one . . . The

charge comes from the adviser, Richard Clarke . . . Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq,

even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan . . . Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally [sic] thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Another American stated in hindsight, "If the government can use 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq, then what prevents them [sic] from using 9/11 to shut up anyone who doesn't agree with government policy? They think the U.S. public will believe their scare tactics . . . To a frightening degree they have been right" ("9/11-Big Deal"). Rationales for war with Iraq were manufactured, as we now know, out of little more than thin air and a fervent wish by the Executive Branch to wage war, on Iraq in particular. These "compelling" reasons were then swallowed by the Legislative Branch. The national mood then was that if one did not favor war, one was "unpatriotic." Using 9/11 to convince America to wage war against Iraq was a misguided tactic, for three main reasons: (1) Iraq presented no military threat; (2) U.N. inspectors had been unable to find weapons of mass destruction there; and (3) U.N sanctions against Iraq were not given enough time to work. Based on those reasons, I believe the 9/11 terrorist attacks used to justify the war were inadequate and inappropriate.

First, Iraq presented no threat to the United States. When then-Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations General Assembly earlier that year, asserting reliable evidence Iraq had WMD enough Americans became frightened of another foreign attack, this time by Iraq. However, the American public would likely not have bought that argument had we not recently been attacked. President George W. Bush also mentioned, in his State of the Union Address, what even his close advisors knew was false: Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa. Next, sinister links between Iraq and Osama bin Laden was made to seem real, although no evidence of that existed, either. James Bamford suggests: ". . . The Bush administration's immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism" (Back Flap). Meanwhile, American troops were so preoccupied with Iraq that Osama bin Laden slipped into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where America should have been concentrating, with America now in extremely cool pursuit. We let the real villain go while we chased a chimera in Iraq. Even now, bin Laden, the real perpetrator of 9/11, remains free. As the 911 Commission Report states: "This immeasurable pain was inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan [emphasis added], ("Executive Summary," p. 10).

House and Senate members doubting the need for war feared voting or even speaking out, for fear of being labeled "unpatriotic." However, it was only in the aftermath of 9/11 that we embraced waging war on a nation that did no threaten us.

Second, U.N. inspectors had already discovered that no weapons of mass destruction (which still provided the most powerful rationale for war) existed in Iraq. Undaunted, President Bush and his delegates insisted, again and again, that such weapons did exist. Once we entered Iraq, we would find them. Implicitly, that idea cleverly stroked the still-bruised national ego: we wanted to believe that hastily-trained American troops could somehow find what trained U.N. inspectors could not. We would oust Saddam from his palaces and personal areas, where (as we "knew") weapons certainly were. Afraid after 911, Americans bought that argument. It would have been one matter if the U.N. inspectors had seemed complicit with Iraq in hiding such weapons, but the inspectors, headed by a German, Hans Blix, representing many countries, were neutral. Still, after they came up empty, America thought we would find the weapons since (due, again, to 9/11) we were simply more motivated to do so. That second, equally fallacious argument would have never have flown had 9/11 not first occurred.