With no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links to Sept. 11, the White House's pretexts for pre-emptive war have been repudiated.
Published June 18, 2004
The bipartisan Sept. 11 commission's latest report garnered large headlines, but its conclusions weren't really surprising or new. The commission's comprehensive investigation has found "no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaida cooperated on attacks against the United States." In fact, the report concludes that al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's regime did not even have a "collaborative relationship" in a broader sense. President Bush disputed that conclusion, but he offered no evidence to contradict the commission's findings, which were based on a review of pertinent classified documents.
The president's defensiveness is understandable. In case there was any remaining doubt, the report demolishes another pretext for the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. Although the president has acknowledged that he has seen "no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11," he and other White House officials have repeatedly insinuated such a connection, and the president continues to refer to Iraq as the central battleground in the war on terror. As a result, polls have shown that most Americans believe Iraq was linked to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, has persisted in claiming an alliance between Hussein and al-Qaida that is not substantiated by the available evidence. Even if the administration's claims of a Hussein-al-Qaida link unrelated to Sept. 11 were accurate, they would not have served as a justification for war. Several other governments, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, have had much broader and better documented ties to al-Qaida, yet no one in the administration has suggested that those ties constituted a cause for pre-emptive war.
In the absence of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or links to 9/11, the White House is left only with a humanitarian justification for war. A case might have been made that Hussein, like Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkans in the 1990s, had committed atrocities on such a scale that the world had a moral imperative to intervene. However, that is not the case the Bush administration made prior to the war. Instead, it tried to justify a pre-emptive war by exaggerating the threat Iraq posed to the United States.
The Sept. 11 commission has dealt only tangentially with Iraq. Instead, it is responsible for investigating the intelligence failures that preceded Sept. 11 and recommending changes needed to prevent future attacks. Winning the war against terrorism will require an international alliance that is unified by credible American leadership. By dividing the international community and squandering its own credibility, the Bush White House has allowed the war in Iraq to impede that effort.
