Behind the changing rationales for war

Why did the United States invade Iraq? And why are 146,000 American troops still there?

These are simple - maybe simplistic - questions. Yet intentional or not, the official (and publicly perceived) rationale for that invasion and that continued presence has been shifting in ways that may cloud the past and make murky the future of Iraq.

With the White House under fire for hyping (but not finding) weapons of mass destruction or any Al Qaeda terrorist link to Saddam Hussein, the war seems to have come down primarily to one of humanitarian liberation - "regime change" to free Iraqis from despotism. Mass grave sites, stories of long imprisonments, and Uday Hussein's torture of Olympic athletes reinforce this motivation.

But for many experts and ordinary Americans, this raises doubts about a preemptive strike against a foreign power half-way around the world that may not have been a direct threat to the United States. Compounding this concern is the fact that the effort to rebuild Iraq is proving costly for US forces: Nearly as many American lives have been lost since the fall of Baghdad as before the statues of the Iraqi dictator fell.

Public debate continues to focus on chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons - those weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that seemed to be the main reason for going to war.

As weeks wear on with no smoking gun, administration rhetoric has changed.

Before the war, the president and top administration officials left the impression that Iraq had a large WMD arsenal poised and ready with field commanders authorized to launch such weapons within minutes.

"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq has stockpiles of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent ... enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets," Secretary of State Colin Powell said in his prewar speech at the United Nations.

This week, President Bush spoke more generally of a "weapons program" that Iraq "had" or "did have" in the past. "I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program," Mr. Bush told reporters Monday.

After some controversy about those remarks, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush was not backing down on the view that Hussein had actual WMD.

Others support this view.

"Most of the evidence still points to the conclusion Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," says Loren Thompson, head of security studies at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "Indeed, his representatives documented the Iraqi arsenal of germ and chemical weapons in successive declarations during the 1990s. What the Iraqis were not able to document in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom was that they had actually destroyed the weapons."

Politically, whether Iraq "has" or "had" such weapons may not prove crucial to US public opinion.

"Whether or not they find weapons of mass destruction doesn't matter, because the rationale for the war changed," Republican pollster Frank Luntz told the Associated Press. "Americans like a good picture. And one photograph of an Iraqi child kissing a US soldier is more powerful than two months of debate [about WMD] on the floor of Congress."

For many Americans, the rationale for ousting Hussein never rested solely on WMD. Since his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, many viewed him as a dangerous and destabilizing force in the Middle East.

However, the failure to find WMD comes at a difficult time, with other challenges surfacing in Iraq. Many of the occupying US troops remain on high alert as well-organized attackers kill another American every day or so. And freedom for many Iraqis so far means no paycheck, not enough food or fuel, and continued lawlessness.

Page: 1 | 2