GEORGE W. BUSH
You'll no doubt notice that I haven't mentioned George W. Bush yet. Many people seem to really hate him. It is hard to distance him from the war in Iraq because not only is he leading it right now, his father was embroiled in it from the beginning. He may indeed be the wrong man with the wrong cabinet and the wrong ideas about international policy for these times, but I think a lot of the broad issues of Iraq should be discussed without him.

However, there are two things I can say about him. One, he is sincere when he says he wants to liberate the Iraqi people from the oppression of Saddam Hussein. Upon reading about all of the human rights violations and genocides that the U.S. had turned its back on over the years (as detailed in a New York Review article from which I got the idea for the first part of the last section), George Bush penned a memo in the margins and sent it back to the author: "Not on my watch." Meaning that he would not allow this to happen during his administration. I don't think he is being disingenuous when he says he wants to liberate the Iraqi people.

The second thing I can say about Bush is that he hasn't levelled with America or the world about the real reasons for going to war. This is an error, to be sure, but I can't fault him too much for this. It could be political suicide to admit that the Gulf war(s) has anything to do with oil. But that is only because so many voters don't think beyond the first sentence of any statement a leader makes. The problem occurs when thinking citizens hear the sales pitch given by our leaders and assume that those leaders are unaware of or not fussing up to the reality. There has always been and always will be much more behind the words that the politicians feed to us, so we can't spend our days arguing against the half truths that they spew forth rather than arguing about the truth behind the decisions. And this whole back story I've given you is some of the truth behind the decision to go to war in Iraq.

THE TRUTH IS that deposing Saddam has been needed for a long time. The Al-queda attacks were merely an opportune moment to bring it back to the table. America, most American leaders, and the world never would have supported a war during the peaceful 90's. So it comes out now. But its not new. Iraq has not been out of the minds of any nation since the end of the Gulf war in 1991, least of all the U.S.'s. In fact, Saddam Hussein has been the most consistent concern of U.S. foreign policy and in the U.N. for the past 11 years. Worrying about Saddam Hussein has taken time and resources away from working on other long term problems, such as North Korea and AIDS in Africa. One Brazilian foreign minister, in a U.N. meeting where once again Saddam and his latest violation of weapons inspection was brought up, was quoted as saying "(do) we really need to have the Iraq problem on the table every six months...we've all become very tired of the Iraq problem. Isn't there some way of getting rid of it, once and for all?"

Well, of course there is. But first lets consider what exasperated this official in the first place.