In case you've forgotten what happened, or were just 10 years old or so and not paying attention when it did, the rationale for that authorization was cooked up. As some of us assumed then and learned for certain a few years later, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their pals wanted a war with Iraq long before they had an excuse. That excuse came when hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania farm.
Not that Saddam Hussein's nasty dictatorship had anything to do with that attack. But September 11 was a handy justification. Add to that the menace of weapons of mass destruction that Hussein was said to have in abundance and war fever was easy to spread. Take a poll today and you can bet it will show a hefty percentage of Americans still believe the Iraqi leader collaborated with the hijackers.
The administration lied and lied and lied. Come March, shock and awe was delivered, soon followed by more of the torture that had been going on since the first terrorist suspects were grabbed off the streets of Europe and elsewhere. Billions of shrink-wrapped dollars poured into Iraq, much of it still unaccounted for. Halliburton and other war profiteers made fortunes off no-bid contracts. The media excelled as a pipeline for brazen propaganda.
Then came the spectacle of codpiece George, strutting on the deck of an aircraft carrier like the fighter pilot he never was, smirking beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner. And two months later came the spectacle of Donald Rumsfeld, as the casualties rose, demanding that a slightly awakened media stop pretending an insurgency was growing in Iraq. There was Dan Senor, now an adviser for Mitt Romney, speaking for the Provisional Coalition Authority, saying in public that everything was hunky-dory while saying in private that disaster was unfolding. There was the looting, the ethnic cleansing, the thievery.
And there were the endless rivers of blood. The unpublicized flights of bodies into Dover Air Force Base.
There is a long list of the dead who would not be dead were it not for this war initiated out of rancid bravado, imperialist ideology and doctored "evidence."Thousands of dead Americans and allied troops. And, at the very least,120,000 dead Iraqis, perhaps several hundred thousand.
I wrote last March on the ninth anniversary of the start of the invasion:
Deaths in any war are terrible enough. Deaths in a war of choice, a concocted war, an illegal preventive war, count as nothing short of murder. The list of the maimed, the widowed, the orphaned is far longer, the list of the psychologically impaired longer still.Before George W. Bush was voted 5-4 by the Supreme Court into the presidency, those who lied us into this war were already plotting their justification for sinking deeper military and economic roots into the Middle East—petropolitics and neo-imperialist sophistry interlaced with arrogant disdain for Iraqis and Americans alike.
When they stepped into office in the footsteps of Bush, the mediocrity they had chosen to manipulate, terrorism gave them no worries, as Richard Clarke later explained to us. They focused, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later informed us, on finding the right excuse to persuade the American people to go to war with Saddam Hussein. This they perceived and planned as a prelude for going to war with some of his neighbors. Less than nine months later, the excuse dropped into their laps in the form of Osama bin Laden's kamikaze crews.
From that terrible day forward, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow rogues engineered the invasion with eager nods from Bush. They saw the chance to carry out their invasion plan and moved every obstacle—most especially the truth—out of their way to make it happen.
It didn't have to happen. They could have been blocked. Due diligence and some spinal fortitude in Congress might have stopped the war in its tracks. But in October 2002, the Senate and the House voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution. Five months and one week later, the bombs began falling on Baghdad.