Washington In Iraq: A Convenient Truth

Iraq is not at war with Iran, but Washington appears to be posturing for just such a follow-up invasion, one that Americans fear would, in many ways, mirror the second Iraqi invasion. But based on everything we know about Al Qaeda in Iraq, it is but a small faction, a fraction of what might curtail counterinsurgency efforts there led by the Pentagon In Iraq and the Iraqi government.

The problem is really not the Pentagon In Iraq, just as it is not Al Qaeda In Iraq, just as it was not Saddam who bombed the Trade Center on 9/11, in Iraq. Clearly, the problem is becoming Washington In Iraq, which will become, if we're not careful, Washington In Iran. How are Pentagon commanders supposed to explain to the Shiite-led Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki that while Washington might be preparing for a war with Iran, over its nuclear programs, the Pentagon's primary concern is stability in Iraq, which could even be compromised by just such saber-rattling ? Sure the Iranian nuclear program is a concern to the International Community. But notwithstanding an Iraqi government at war with Iran, how can the Pentagon In Iraq justify to the Iraqi government and American people, Washington at war with Iran ?

It makes it appear as if the entire Iraqi endeavor was directed at Iran in the first place, and as if the Iraqi invasion, predicated on the testimony of one, " Curveball," was devoid any redeemingly substantive basis. Saddam never possessed WOMDs, even as the American people continued for at least two years after the invasion to believe otherwise.

That's not to say that Saddam never violated international law, in the early 1980s, as an Iraqi court ruled. But it happened in the context of a war with Iran. So the same arguments that the adminstration uses to justify sex torture with political aims of the kind that were committed at Abu Ghraib, because those acts occurred in the context of a war, coincide with what arguments were long used to justify acts committed by Saddam that were found to be genocidal, more than two decades hence, and not without strategic implication.

Again, if the purpose of invading Iraq was to wage war with Iran, strategically, the idea that Saddam had once committed genocide becomes ever less compelling with respect to the real strategic motive. The fact that Saddam committed genocide becomes nothing more than a convenient truth.