McClatchy Commentary: Bush's rationale for Iraq war keeps changing

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Commentary: Bush's rationale for Iraq war keeps changing
By Joseph L. Galloway | McClatchy Newspapers

* Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007



Year-by-year, month-by-month, now even day-to-day, we're treated to a different rationale for the Iraq war from a different President George W. Bush.

In the beginning, the reasons for invading Iraq and toppling the dictator Saddam Hussein were his possession of weapons of mass destruction, his nuclear weapons program and his links to the real al Qaida.

When no evidence of the truth of any of those reasons could be found after a year and millions spent in a desperate, failed search, the rationale became the installation of a freely elected democratic government in Baghdad.

For the best part of a year, the Bush administration denied that a homegrown insurgency had taken root in Iraq. In their view, it was just a collection of Baath Party “dead-enders” and foreign jihadists who were killing Americans.

Then the administration grudgingly admitted that there was an Iraqi insurgency, but carried on with a campaign that focused on brute force — kicking in doors, searching families, carting off the men in wholesale sweeps that filled prisons and detention camps to overflowing — that had nothing to do with counterinsurgency warfare except to create many more insurgents.

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