¶ … 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...
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…
