A
year ago, the Congress of the United States overwhelmingly approved
a resolution authorizing the President to use military force against
Iraq to enforce United Nations resolutions the Iraqi regime was
allegedly violating. The vote came after a months-long campaign
by the administration to convince the Congress and the American
people that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed and was prepared
to use biological and chemical "weapons of mass destruction,"
that he was developing nuclear weapons and that his regime posed,
in the words of President Bush, "a grave and gathering danger"
to the safety and the security of the United States. And it was
sometimes asserted, though more often implied, that the Iraqi regime
had close ties to the al Qaida network and was in some way responsible
for the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11,
2001.

Yet
today, the costs of that war, both in lives and dollars, are escalating
while public support for it is waning. So the President is on another
campaign to convince us that this war really was necessary and that
the only alternative would have been, as he said in New Hampshire
last week, to "leave the security of the United States in the
hands of a madman." Bush still insists he was "not about
to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam
Hussein." Yet seven months after launching a war against the
Iraqi dictator, the President has yet to come up with plausible
evidence that the madman had either the plans or the means for threatening
American security. And, as the President acknowledged not long ago,
"We have no evidence" of any connection between Baghdad
and the events of 9/11.

Nearly
six months after the President declared the end of major combat
operations in Iraq, Americans are still being killed on a daily
basis. After months of fruitless searches, the "weapons of
mass destruction" have still not been found. The British intelligence
report the President relied on for his claim that Iraq had purchased
uranium form Niger for nuclear weapons production turned out to
have been bogus. The Iraq Survey Team headed by David Kay recently
reported it found no evidence of a nuclear program after 1991. As
for the biological and chemical weapons, it found only laboratories
"suitable for continuing CBW research" – as most modern
laboratories are.

So
Bush is now playing up the "humanitarian" argument for
the war: that it saved "the dissidents who would be in (Saddam's)
prisons or end up in his mass graves" and the "men and
women who would fill Saddam's torture chambers or rape rooms."
Surely, the case against the tyranny and shocking human rights violations
of Saddam Hussein and any number of the world's other despots is
a strong and compelling one. But that is not the basis on which
the Iraq war was sold to the American people. And the Bush regime
knows that neither the public nor the Congress would have bought
it on that basis. The President turns out to be the prime purveyor
of something he has accused his critics of practicing – "revisionist
history."

Was
the case for war, then, "a fraud, made up in Texas" for
political advantage, as Sen. Kennedy has charged? Recall the comment
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card made last fall, when asked
why the President was pressing his case for war just before the
congressional elections. "You don't roll out a new product
in August," Card replied. Around the same time, Jonah Goldberg,
a gung-ho supporter of the war, reported in his syndicated column
that Presidential adviser Karl Rove was giving Republicans "power-point
presentations" on the advantages of the war to the GOP. Those
political advantages may not be all that motivated the President
to beat the war drums as he did, but the White House was surely
aware of them and willing to exploit them.

And
the Democrats, with a few notable exceptions, hardly provided a
profile in courage. Most of the congressional Democrats who opposed
the war and at least a few Republicans who had expressed grave doubts
about it, were deathly afraid of being portrayed as somehow unpatriotic,
or unwilling to defend the American people against terrorism, if
they didn't fall in line behind the President. In the end, they
did, by authorizing the President to exercise a power the Constitution
has given to the Congress alone – the power to declare war.

Many
of those who voted for that resolution, including a few now running
for President, have since become quite eloquent in criticizing Bush
over the war and the manner in which he has prosecuted it. Their
complaints ring hollow after they unconstitutionally ceded to the
commander in chief carte blanche to determine, entirely as his own
discretion, whether and when we would be at war with Iraq.

October
18, 2003

Manchester, NH, resident Jack Kenny (send
him mail) is a freelance writer.