The case against the Iraq war :Andrew Greeley(Suntimes)

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http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/cst-edt-greel30.html
The case against the Iraq war

January 30, 2004

BY ANDREW GREELEY


David Kay, the American official who headed the search for weapons of mass destruction, says that there are none. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who will certainly be dumped next year if President Bush is re-elected, says virtually the same thing. Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in an article in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly admits that the case was inadequate and that American intelligence, especially under pressure from the administration, failed badly. He concludes: ''Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore or trusts the Bush administration to tell the truth.''

In the same magazine, James Fallows argues that the failures in postwar Iraq were not the result of the absence of planning, but of U.S. leaders ignoring the excellent planning that had been done. When the National Intelligence Council ran a two-day exercise on postwar Iraq, for example, the office of the Secretary of Defense forbade Pentagon representatives to attend. Fallows concludes: ''When the decisions of the past 18 months are assessed and judged, the administration will be found wanting for its carelessness. Because of the warnings it chose to ignore, it squandered American prestige, fortune and lives.''


We will leave behind not a democratic Iraq but another Shiite theocracy -- not quite as rigid, perhaps, as the one in Iran -- and the prospect of continuing conflict among Iraq's diverse tribes. Those who knew something about the Middle East warned that such an endgame was likely. Arab culture does not seem to be compatible with what Americans define as democracy.

The war, it is clear by now, was unnecessary, ill-conceived, unjust and doomed to humiliating and costly failure. It was, as Fallows says, ''careless.'' Most everyone in the world knows this truth except half of the American people, whose patriotism and fear of terrorism is superior to their perceptiveness.