IRAQ: Part of the ‘War on Terror’?
By: Julio César Laínez
4/22/2004

he situation in Iraq is not rapidly improving like many in the Bush administration would like you to believe; some think that it will get worse before it gets any better. In retrospect, we should have continued fighting al-Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan and ‘taking it to them’ until we captured Osama bin Laden, the one that was responsible for that terrible day in 2001. The administration got greedy and thought that we could somehow fight two wars at the same time; our leadership failed us miserably….once again.

While Bush refocused his priorities toward a harmless Iraq, Osama bin Laden escaped the Tora Bora region and found safe refuge somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is unacceptable and a cause for concern for many Americans. Former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard Clarke sheds light into an alarming lapse of intelligence within the Bush administration on the months preceding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In his new book, “Against All Enemies,” Mr. Clarke blasts the president for inciting terrorists by invading Iraq.

“Nothing America could have done would have provided al-Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country,” said Mr. Clarke. That is certainly a feeling that is being echoed around the world, especially in Spain where the population voted out of office the ruling conservative party, Partido Popular (PP), which backed Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq.

The Spanish favored Socialist Party candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero right after terrorists, presumably from al-Qaeda and not ETA, bombed a train station in Madrid killing over 200 people just three days before the general election.

Spain’s reaction to the attacks, voting the Partido Popular out of office, was more of a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction than a smart one, since it gives the terrorists a sense of victory in a time of great peril. The action of the Spanish people is deplorable and irresponsible since the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism are two very different beasts.

The failure of the Spanish people to see this and the appeasement to the terrorists has created a very dangerous precedent. What’s not to say, judging by what happened in Madrid, that terrorist would plan to bomb a train station in Washington just before the election? Instead of confronting the problem of terrorism, which is a problem that affects all nations, Spain has deliberately pulled away from it. Supporting the ‘war on terror,’ something Spain has done very well as they have arrested many ETA and al-Qaeda terrorists within its borders, has nothing to do with invading Iraq and the failure to differentiate between both situations, even though the Bush administration has tried to tie them together, is a huge and costly mistake.

We have been somewhat successful in the fight with al-Qaeda, since there hasn’t been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001, but we are far from winning the war. Instead of shifting attention from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, Mr. Bush should have continued the assault against the men responsible for 9/11 and not a dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction nor was an eminent threat like the administration wanted you to believe.

The same circumstances that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein could have led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Granted, the capture of bin Laden would not have ended al-Qaeda’s reign of terror, but it would have been a big boost of morale for the American people. It is clear that Mr. Bush and his closest advisors, more importantly Karl Rove, do not want this to become a politicized event in a politically-charged campaign, but those hopes have been quickly dashed with the publishing of a new book, “Against All Enemies,” by former White House terrorism Czar, Richard Clarke.

In the book, Clarke stresses that the Bush administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq even before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This highly controversial book comes out at the worst time for the Bush administration as it is involved in hearings, along with members of the Clinton administration, for the 9/11 bi-partisan commission. The very nature of invading Iraq without a UN mandate and without sufficient intelligence illustrating Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction will forever plague the Bush administration even as it tries, unsuccessfully, to link Iraq with the war on terrorism.

It is obvious that the Iraqi people are better off without the cruel reign of terror of Saddam Hussein, but the last time I checked, Washington was located in the U.S. and not in Iraq. Are Americans safer now that Saddam Hussein is no longer the head of Iraq? Maybe, but he was not an eminent threat to begin with. After a year since the first bomb dropped in Iraq, the CIA has found no weapons of mass destruction and all they have found was scant proof that he could have had the capability to restart his weapons programs, which had not restarted before the invasion.

Regime change for the sake of regime change is not a smart policy. We are legitimizing a very dangerous practice that some day could backfire. How can we tell Israel not to go after Yasser Arafat and his terror infrastructure while we go and do the same exact thing to a dictator that was not even behind any terror attacks in our homeland? We are setting the precedent of a perilous double-standard which cannot but hurt our prestige around the world and especially with our allies.

North Korea and Pakistan could very well take matters into their own hands and declare South Korea and India a danger to their peoples and engage in brutal wars that could ignite a conflict so vast that could threaten the very existence of humanity. President Kennedy once said that we live in a world of “man-made problems,” and since they are, indeed, man-made, then they “can be solved by man.” Unfortunately this hope and idealism has not been passed down from president to president as we have seen a decline of prestige in the Oval Office. A world without Saddam Hussein could be categorized as indeed a safer world, for the Iraqi people at least, but as stated earlier, the American people would be safer without the al-Qaeda top brass, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, than without an old dictator with no weapons.
Obviously, we cannot pull out of Iraq altogether in one swift move like Democratic presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich proclaimed in the Democratic debates. We have made a commitment to the people of Iraq to help rebuild their country after we invaded it and destroyed their infrastructure.

It would be irresponsible and would make matters even worse since a pull-out by American forces would more than likely pave the way for rogue ideologues to head the country’s new government. We cannot let that happen because it would make matters worse than before. What we need to do is consult with our allies and work with them in the reconstruction of the country.

We must award contracts to countries like France and Germany with the caveat that those countries that benefit from hefty rebuilding contracts must also help with the security of the country. We must work with NATO and the UN more closely because Iraq is not just a problem for the U.S., but it is a problem for the world as a whole. We live in a world community and it is the obligation of powerful countries to help out countries in need.

Once we internationalize the effort then we can begin to pull out troops and eventually have a new Iraqi government take charge of their country. It won’t be easy, it has not been easy, but we have no choice. We were taken down the path of war based on faulty intelligence which gave the hawks within the administration a pretext for the invasion. But, this is not a time to forgo our responsibility and leave the place worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. We must work with the world community to restore order and rebuild Iraq for the sake of its people and, most importantly, for the sake of peace and stability in the Middle East.

This is the time for a strong leader with strong convictions and the ability to work with our allies. We need a president that will help unite the American people and also unite the world in the fight against terrorism. Al-Qaeda is not just a problem of the United States, but as the bombings in Madrid, Tanzania, Yemen, and Singapore have shown, it is a problem that has worldwide connotations. We can debate whether or not Iraq was the right thing to do, but one thing that is not up to debate is the situation that our troops and the Iraqi people are living and our commitment to help rebuild a country which we invaded under false assumptions. As more American and coalition troops are killed and more innocent civilians are caught between the crosshairs, we must not forget the reason for this struggle. There is no greater force than man’s eternal desire to be free and independent, and this desire is not bound by any lines of demarcation only by the essence of our soul.

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