Remember We Were Wrong, Beginning

For our children’s children, please remember that our attack on Afghanistan wasn’t about one man. Yes, bin Laden was the head we wished to snare and detach but it was the organization, Al Qaeda, that we wanted to squash and kill. The proof of that idea lies in the fact that once we had them scattered and scurrying for the hills, the urgency of the Osama: Dead or Alive mission instantly waned.

Afghanistan was the first strike in the unglamorous and so-called Global War on Terrorism, code words for the dirty fight against a dangerous network of men driven by their fanatical ideology and violent hatred of Western materialism. They did and they do threaten the entire Western world with their insanity.

That struggle goes on as I write but Iraq was not about that.

Our government tried to convince us that Iraq was about terrorism but it was not. Our government tried to convince us it was about Weapons of Mass Destruction but it was not. When all else failed to convince us, adding to the list of things that Iraq was not, they tried to make us believe that it was about democracy and freedom. It wasn’t even about the Iraqi people harboring a dangerous threat to the world. To many of us at the time, none of those deceptions mattered.

It was, in the end, about Saddam Hussein, a devious man who held a divided nation and a turbulent spot on the world at gunpoint, eternally hostage to his ruthless plans.

Would he carry out his threat? Given the opportunity, I have no doubt he or his sons would have.

Could he carry out his threat? Probably not without significant help from others; I believe we had him effectively cornered.

But he was there in that corner and he had worried us for a long time. Iraq was all about this one man.

In his book, Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke wrote that during his years as the “terrorism expert” in the White House he had found no Al Qaeda connection in Iraq. He wrote that in a cabinet meeting shortly after 9/11 he curiously listened to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld openly advocate bombing Iraq and then had President Bush ardently urge him behind closed doors to find the Iraq connection. The White House maintains that no record of such pressure exists.

I have no evidence of my secret urges at that time, either. But I will admit this to you without offering any further proof.

Only minutes after the smoke began to billow from Ground Zero, I thought to myself that here was our golden opportunity to finally straighten out a host of messes in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. I thought this was our chance to fix our mistake of 1991. To be more specific, I hoped … I actually hoped that an Iraq connection to this tragedy would be discovered. I really wanted 9/11 to signal our response to the world that the patient approach to Saddam Hussein was over.

I was in no position to make such a determination. I was just an average peon following orders. But I can’t imagine I was alone in those thoughts. I did not hear it spoken but I believe there were many who felt like I did on that horrific day.

In retrospect, the facts did not support those angered thoughts. Anyone who thought like I did during those first few fearful moments was wrong. In our defense, we were so mad we couldn’t rationally predict the outcome of our revenge; we couldn’t fathom the consequences of our actions.

I was wrong to think that way so quickly and I admit that now.

But, even after we were disappointed by the facts of the matter, I think anyone who had those first thoughts and then says those secret urges didn’t linger would be a liar. There were many who wanted that connection to be real regardless of the facts. It is reasonable for me to assume that is at least in part why we so readily glossed over the deceptive justifications.

There is one other complex and expedient aspect of our decision to attack Saddam Hussein for which I can offer no direct support except the sum of my recollections.

Part of Osama bin Laden’s argument, if you will, against America and her allies was that our infidel troops engaged in containing Hussein were defiling holy Muslim land by their very presence in Saudi Arabia. To my understanding, bin Laden later graciously granted this same consideration to the land of other Muslim nations on the peninsula as well.

I remember this because delivering our troops out of the sweltering Arabian desert was perhaps the only thing that Osama bin Laden and I both regularly prayed for.

There seemed obvious and infinite diplomatic concerns with carrying out an attack on Baghdad from bases in Saudi Arabia. There seemed a strange urgency in the timing of relocating our forces out of Saudi Arabia while concurrently coordinating the attack. There seemed an understandable worry about how to continue containing Iraq from somewhere other than where we were had grown accustomed, even if uncomfortably so. The expeditious nature of all these moves lent an air of now-or-never desperation to the events which, looking back now, only adds more fuel to my belief that we did this for all the wrong reasons.

On to the Finale ...