The State Of The Union Is About The State Of Iraq

Joe Bell

Prior to giving his State of the Union address, well-meaning political pundits suggested President Bush, given his unpopularity, focus on things that are going well, like the economy, and avoid Iraq as much as possible. To have done so would have been irresponsible. Iraq is the single most important issue on the agenda. The nation has, for years, agonized, argued and waffled over Iraq. America is at its current wobbly juncture because it has largely reverted back to a pre-9/11 mindset – an era where the nation fooled itself into thinking it was not at war.

Stabilizing Iraq and ensuring it does not become a refuge for terrorists are among the most consequential matters of U.S. security. Bush appropriately dedicated a large portion of his speech to Iraq – arguably the primary source of his unpopularity – and said things he and other Republicans should have been saying loudly and often over the past two years.

Bush said, “If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime. A contagion of violence could spill out across the country - and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict. …For the enemy, this is the objective. Chaos is … their greatest ally in this struggle. And out of chaos in Iraq would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America.”

The situation in Iraq is grave. To think it can not decay into something worse is madness.

Undoubtedly some would like to see Iraq collapse because they would like to see a Republican president fail, even at the expense of the national interest. But it is likely that most who oppose Bush’s Iraq policy sincerely do not comprehend what is at stake because for so long liberals and their media colleagues have fed the public a diet of mush about “no weapons of mass destruction” and how “Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11”. From their narrow perspective, 9/11 is the lone focal point of the war. They have forgotten the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the U.S.S. Cole attack in 2000, and the 1998 attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. America was at war well before 2001 but refused to acknowledge the fact.

Proving that the desire for political cover can override good judgment, the day after Bush’s speech Democrats and one Republican (Senator Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted that Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in Iraq is “not in the national interest.”

Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who wants to be president, said he would have preferred a measure declaring U.S. troop levels in Iraq “may not exceed the levels” that were in place before Bush announced the increase.

Hagel said, “We better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”

It is impossible to imagine anyone in government who, with access to mountains of information, doesn’t know the significance of Iraq. It is impossible to accept they do not know that WMDs have been found there. In October 2003, during congressional testimony, Dr. David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, said, “We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the U.N. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts … a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to U.N. monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research … reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons; new research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the U.N.; documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).”

For those who advance the fiction that “America is wrong” these facts have no meaning. But they have great meaning and the facts as they have unfolded over the past decade and more reveal in an uncompromising manner how the world arrived at this juncture with respect to global terrorism, why America is in Iraq and why it is critical that the national debate turn away from “how soon can we leave” to “what do we need to do to bring order so a political solution is possible”?

The Democrat’s response to Bush’s speech, offered by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, illustrates the frightening reality that the party is oblivious as to why Iraq is critical. Webb said, “Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism…”

There are those who insist the battle for the future of Iraq is a civil war and a distraction, as Webb said, from the war against the global terrorist network. But Al Qaeda considers Iraq a key component in that war. On January 11, 2007, speaking before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Lieutenant General Michael Maples, director, Defense Intelligence Agency, said, “…documents captured in a raid on an al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) safehouse in Iraq revealed AQI was planning terrorist operations in the U.S.”

Apparently al Qaeda has not been informed that the ongoing battle for Iraq’s future is a civil war and has nothing to do with the war on terrorism. Senators Dodd, Webb and Hagel should contact AQI immediately and explain to them their preferred version of reality.

That America remains ensnared in a debate over Iraq is preposterous. From all sides the evidence screams that the future of that brutalized nation is intimately wrapped up in both the future of the Middle East and global terrorism. America can try to divorce itself from the real world and Democrats, with some misguided Republicans alongside, may pull off such a dubious accomplishment. If so, there will come a horrible day when reality again visits America in the form of a nightmare scenario in which thousands, perhaps more, die because the nation’s leaders chose to placate those who prefer not to think about bad things.

Speaking at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in August 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “We in the Americas are no longer a far away continent, to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm.”

The words are truer today than when Roosevelt spoke them. America’s leaders must lead and that means explaining unpleasant truths and confronting dreadful challenges, not being led by public opinion that prefers soft and convenient myths that invite genuine tragedy on a monumental scale.

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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.

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