It took President Bush a long time to break his summer vacation and acknowledge
the pain that the families of fallen soldiers are feeling as the death toll in
Iraq continues to climb. When he did, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars
in Utah this week, he said exactly the wrong thing. In an address that repeatedly
invoked Sept. 11 - the day that terrorists who had no discernable connection whatsoever
to Iraq attacked targets on American soil - Mr. Bush offered a new reason for
staying the course: to keep faith with the men and women who have already died
in the war. "We owe them something," Mr. Bush said. "We will finish the task
that they gave their lives for." It was, as the mother of one fallen National
Guardsman said, an argument that "makes no sense." No one wants young men and
women to die just because others have already made the ultimate sacrifice. The
families of the dead do not want that, any more than they want to see more soldiers
die because politicians cannot bear to admit that they sent American forces to
war by mistake.
Most Americans believed that their country had invaded
Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons
did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have
been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and
his advisers may have had.
It is also very clear, although the president
has done his level best to muddy the picture, that Iraq had nothing to do with
Sept. 11. Mr. Bush's insistence on making that link, over and over, is irresponsible.
In fact, it was the American-led invasion that turned Iraq into a haven for Islamist
extremists.
When Mr. Bush articulated his "comprehensive strategy" for
responding to the threat of terrorism, he listed three aims: "protecting this
homeland, taking the fight to the enemy and advancing freedom." The invasion of
Iraq flunks the first two tests. But it did free the Iraqi people from a brutal
dictator and may still provide an opportunity to inspire the rest of the Arab
world with an example of democracy and religious toleration.
Right now,
however, the Iraqi Assembly is dickering over a constitution draft that would
not accomplish any of the American goals. It would fail to protect the rights
of Iraq's Sunni Arab minority and the rights of women, and it would enshrine Islam
as a main source of law. It could well lead to a fracturing of Iraq into an all
but independent, and oil-rich, Kurdish homeland in the north and an oil-rich Shiite
theocracy in the south, while the oil-poor center was left to the disaffected
Sunnis, the terrorists and the American troops. It's an outcome that would make
the violent religious extremists very happy.
Preventing that kind of tragic
last chapter is the only rational argument for continuing the American presence
in Iraq. The president's strange declaration yesterday that the draft constitution
would protect the rights of women and minorities, and his continuing attempts
to clog the debate with misleading explanations, suggest his own lack of commitment
to the only rationale for keeping American troops in Iraq - or, perhaps, his lack
of faith in the likely outcome.
© 2005 New York Times,
Inc.
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