Did we invade Iraq because of Sept. 11?

Sent to the Village Times Herald in Stony Brook, NY:

TO THE EDITOR:

In a letter on Dec. 8, Mr. John Brant quotes an article in American Legion Magazine by a medical officer serving in Iraq. “'I wish there was not a war and I wish our young people did not have to fight and die. But I cannot wish away evil men like bin Laden and al-Zarqawi ... and this war will not be over until they are dead. That is the ugly, awful, and brutal truth.'”

The ugly truth is that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the September 11 attacks, that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian (none were Iraqi), that al-Zarqawi is a Jordanian militant whose group didn't join al-Qaeda until 2004 (after the start of the Iraq war), and that neither bin Laden nor al-Zarqawi had any significant involvement with Saddam Hussein or Iraq prior to the invasion. If anything, bin Laden was a natural enemy of Saddam, since bin Laden is a religiously-motivated Islamist fundamentalist and Saddam was a pan-Arabist secular dictator who only used religious rhetoric when it was convenient.

Nobody I know was against the Iraq war because they thought bin Laden and Zarqawi were “wayward children who have gone astray” or “great men who are simply misunderstood.” I and others were against the invasion of Iraq because Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, because Iraq was a lesser threat to the U.S. than Iran and North Korea (even if Iraq had WMD), and because invading Iraq meant diverting vital resources from an effort to deal intelligently with global Islamist extremism. We also guessed correctly that an invasion would be handled poorly, result in thousands of American and tens of thousands Iraqi civilian deaths, turn the world against us, and end with Iraq as an Iran-influenced, semi-democratic Islamic state at best, or, more likely, end in disintegration and civil war.

The brutal truth is that Saddam Hussein, however evil, had nothing significant to do with September 11, and Bush administration officials (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, etc.) wanted to invade Iraq long before 2001. The awful truth is that for them, the September 11 attacks were an excuse, not a reason.

That some soldiers serving in Iraq believe that the decision to invade actually had anything to do with bin Laden does not make it true.

John Hover
East Setauket