Shell Game

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Shell Game
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

June 3, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall "It is…possible that they [Iraq] decided they would destroy them before a conflict and I don't know the answer."---Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld certainly thought he knew about Saddam's weapons before we invaded Iraq, when we were supposed to be in danger of imminent attack by terrorists armed with Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. But the special teams the Pentagon sent to Iraq to locate and deal with the tons of VX gas and anthrax prepared by Hussein have gone home empty-handed. Where are all the chemical munitions, the sarin and mustard gas?

The whole thing is reminscent of that game with the pea and three shells. Under which shell is pea? Place your bets. Well, it's not here.

What we've got to show for our efforts is two clean trucks and a country to run. And a whole lot of oil, which was maybe the real reason behind this to begin with. Or is it a coincidence that we seized the oil wells first and the only building protected by US troops in Bagdad was the Oil Ministry?

Perhaps the oil will be worth it, but meanwhile we're left with the uncomfortable conclusion that either our intelligence continues to be faulty or we were oversold on the need to occupy Iraq. Were our policy makers so determined to invade Iraq that they heard what they wanted to hear?

Conservatives are reduced to making the liberal's case that we went to Iraq to free the Iraqi people from a terrible dictator, not to secure America from an imminent threat. But that's the same argument conservatives themselves opposed when President Clinton made it to justify our intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Well, if we are now to be in the business of rescuing nations from evil dictators, we'd better get busy. There are a whole lot of evil dictators and cruel regimes out there-in Africa, in Asia, in Central America. There's a civil war in the Congo that's taken maybe 4 million lives and threatens mass starvation--perhaps that should be our next intervention.

And how will conservatives answer this Reaganesque question: Are we safer now than we were before the invasion? Saddam is on the run, for sure, joining Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in hiding somewhere. But we're now occupying an Arab country, which is sure to enrage the ordinary Arab against us in the same way that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank angers them. And we've put young American soldiers in harm's way in post-war Iraq, where they are now being killed on an average of one per day: 31 soldiers since May 1, when our Top Gun announced that the war was over.

And we're being told that al-Qaeda operatives and WMD's weren't in Iraq after all, but in Iraq instead. So the pea is in a different shell, not the shell we thought. Okay, maybe they're right. Or perhaps we should be watching the hand moving the shells around more closely, instead. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files