Bush: Did He Lie or Was He Fooled?

The question of Iraq has seemingly gone away this election season. But it shouldn’t. The question is much broader than one relatively small nation. It casts doubts on the whole Bush doctrine and it reminds us that the next president will still have a tiger by the tail.
I know that lack of credit, Wall Street’s agonies and rising unemployment have pushed it out of mind recently. But it’s still there, they’re still shooting and progress is very, very fragile. An interview with Donald Trump, of all people, brought it sharply back to my attention last week.
Trump very bluntly says President Bush should have been impeached for invading Iraq. The interviewer pressed him on why. “He lied”, snapped Trump. He was asked if he really meant that – as opposed to bad intel or general confusion. “He lied,” repeated Trump.
I’m no fan of Trump or his television persona. But it crossed my mind that this is a man who has made big money and done a lot of high flying business deals in his career. You don’t do that successfully if you are not a very good reader of people – unless you can be pretty sure when they are bluffing or lying.
I’ll listen seriously when Mr. Trump insists someone is lying. Needless to say if a president lies and then sends thousands of boys to be shot up or killed, he should be impeached. One cannot imagine a higher crime or misdemeanor. But, even if Trump is mistaken, we’ve still got a nasty situation on our hands – with no real solution in sight.
Before the next president feels forced into invading somewhere else, we’ve got to sit down and figure out why we did what we did and how either not to do it again or how to do it more intelligently. That is probably as urgent as bailing out our banking system.
Let’s look at Iraq. Before Churchill cobbled its three regions into one “nation” in 1921, it had never been or seen itself as a single entity. It had been called “Mesopotamia” –the land between the rivers – for time out of mind. It had been part of an Assyrian Empire, a neo-Babylonian Empire, a Persian and Parthian Empire, the Roman Empire and, finally a succession of Muslim/Turkish Empires.
The Turkish Empire collapsed in 1918. Suddenly, for perhaps the first time since the Biblical Abraham, Mesopotamia was ruled by no one. (This “freedom” didn’t come about until the fighters of Mesopotamia wiped out an invading British army in 1916. It lasted until Britain was given a mandate over the area as spoils of war.)
Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was aware that there was oil in that area. After all, he had used the British oil wells in Iran (Persia) to convert the British navy from coal to oil ten years before. But his immediate problem was that Britain was broke and it cost money to maintain the imperial presence in what is now Iraq. He had a money saving idea back in 1921.
Take Prince Feisal of Arabia (he was played by Omar Sheriff in “Lawrence of Arabia”), create a “kingdom” out of the three regions and hostile populations – Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites – and let Feisal figure out how to run it with minimal British support. It would cut costs enormously.
By 1930, Iraqi resistance had become so stiff that the British withdrew entirely. Feisal was on his own. His family managed to last until 1958 (despite Nazi coups and war with Israel) when his son, Feisal II, and his entire family were machine gunned to death for their pro-western policies. They dragged his body through the streets behind a jeep. So much for John Foster Dulles’s Baghdad Pact.
This is an area that has a history of anti-British and anti-western attitudes, reinforced with effective violence. But it does not mean it was a terrorist state. Not everyone who doesn’t like us is a terrorist. Not every nation that opposes us is worth invading.
We pushed them out of the Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991 with some validity. But to invade them when they had become militarily enfeebled in 2003? What was the sense of that? (And the British went in with us!? Had they forgotten 1916 and 1930?) Did we really think they would lie down and hand us their oil?
They’ve kept their oil. They just want us to rebuild what we blew up and go home in relatively few years. What have we gained? No more than the British did in the 1920s. Our whole national prestige is on the line and we have nothing to show except ruinous cost in blood and money.
Far more terrorists are to be found in Iraq today than Saddam Hussein ever allowed to run about in his era. He was vicious, he may have been nuts, but he had a practical streak. We’d be better off if he were still there –living with the concern over what might happen if we ever invaded.
Maintaining his concern would have cost us little money and less blood. Nor would we have such an ugly black eye in the international community.
So, why did Bush go in with an army that was too small to be effective? Why did he go in at all? Was he dreaming of oil? Was he lying? Was he just getting back at Saddam for taking a shot at daddy? Whatever the reason, we must never again start a war so foolishly.