What are we Afraid of? What Should we be Afraid of?

          On March 20 th, 2003, the United States abruptly and illegally invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq. At the time of invasion, legality was not an issue. The United States needed to remove an imminent threat to her safety. The United Nations and the rest of the world were not going to prevent the US from defending itself. This was a ludicrous idea. The shaky claims that pushed the country into war were reason enough to invade what turned out to be a nearly defenseless Iraq. To a majority of the populace, it was us or them. However as the dust began to clear, the unstable pillars justifying the invasion quickly began to crumble as fact upon fact refuted the claims produced by the Bush Administration. In retrospect, it has become obvious that the United States was falsely pushed into several states of fear in so that the illegal invasion of Iraq would appear legitimate in the eyes of the citizen.

          Responding towards the stipulation for vengeance following the September 11 th attacks, the Bush Administration hurled the United States, and several of its NATO allies, into an international “war on terror”. Targeting Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and more largely the Al Qaeda terror network, US troops were deployed in Afghanistan on a mission to eradicate global terrorism. The world was largely sympathetic towards the United States in this fight, explaining the NATO support, and the absence of controversy surrounding current US military operations. In an attempt to play off of this sympathy, the White House, for a brief period, maintained that Saddam held connections with the Al Qaeda network.

          In one of many speeches nudging the United States towards war with Iraq, Bush claimed that “There's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties” ( 9/17/03). The White House never claimed Iraq played a role in the September 11 th attacks. However, the assertion that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together make it is fair to presume that such fears were being utilized in the case against Iraq. Questionably, the correlation made to arouse such fears was largely unsubstantiated by US intelligence reports.

          Miriam Sapiro, a writer for the American Journal of International Law, published an article entitled Iraq: The Sifting Sands of Preemptive Self-Defense. Regarding the proposed connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam, Sapiro says that “Despite the magnitude of its intelligence capabilities, the United States could not pinpoint... An [Al] Qaeda link [to] Iraq”. Yet even when most of the public had acknowledged that Iraq and Al Qaeda held no significant relations, Dick Cheney maintained that Saddam Hussein “had long-established ties with Al Qaeda” (6/24/04). In essence, Cheney justified the invasion by claiming to have saved the American people from a non existent fear.

          The final blow to the supposed connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq came with the 9-11 committees’ final report. As Douglas Jehl of the New York Times wrote: “the report of the Sept. 11 commission found no ‘collaborative relationship’ between the former Iraqi government and Al Qaeda”. Astonishingly even a commission with what many would consider an all access pass to United States intelligence could not link the two entities together. In the months before invasion, it was hard for the general populace to acknowledge outright that the Bush Administration was intentionally trying to scare the country into war. After all, it is possible to conclude that the Administration simply became a little to anxious following the September 11 th attacks. Ideally, if a country is presumed to be a threat, and that threat is later deemed invalid, the case for action against the country is also refuted. However, the intentions of the Whitehouse become questionable following the refutation of Saddam’s ties to Al Qaeda. Strangely the Whitehouse still presented reason to fear Iraq.