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President Bush's Loss
of Faith
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, August 24, 2005
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.
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