Vanishing case for war in Iraq

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President Bush sold the invasion of Iraq last year on the fear that Saddam Hussein might give chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to his allies in the world terrorist movement, a danger that had to be pre-empted by any means necessary. But it is now clear there was no operational connection between Saddam and al-Qaida that necessitated invading Iraq and what's more, the administration knew it.

Mr. Bush on Thursday continued to insist that "there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," and split hairs over what he had said and what he meant.
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Our blundering in the internal politics of Mesopotamia has cost us dearly in lives and treasure. Better to have left this can of worms on the shelf while we concentrated on finishing the job against al-Qaida so promisingly begun in Afghanistan, killing every terrorist we could find, drying up the sources of terrorist funding and intimidating state sponsors of terror into cleaning up their act.

The war has also been a hard lesson in the fragility of our democratic institutions. The administration has cynically exploited the trauma of 9/11 to justify an unnecessary war, the erosion of civil liberties at home and profiteering on a massive scale. The Congress, to its eternal shame, has allowed itself to be misled and bullied into subverting the Constitution and giving Mr. Bush a blank check to make war as he sees fit. As the nation struggles to come to its senses, the Sept. 11 Commission deserves credit for fighting the obfuscation and stonewalling of the administration to reveal as much as it has of the truth of 9/11 and its aftermath.

http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8854~2222481,00.html


Middle America continually struggles to sidestep any meaningful political analysis of the Iraq adventure ... :(