U.S. President George W. Bush evaded military service in Vietnam and deserted while serving in the National Guard, but he still reportedly likes people to call him “Commander in Chief.”

Fair enough, for the purposes of this column, I’ll call him that, but I’ll use quotation marks (in much the same spirit that Michael Moore does when he refers to Bush as “President” Bush). Earlier this month, the “Commander in Chief” dressed up in a pilot’s costume and made a speech from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. While he didn’t declare victory over Iraq (since the rules of war would require his troops to begin withdrawing if he had done so), he did announce “the end of combat operations.” The backdrop for the speech was a banner that read: “Mission Accomplished.”

The mission, the mission âe¦ oh yes, the United States had a mission in going into Iraq. Unless you subscribe to the idea put forward by Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary, that “war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” perhaps we should try to remember what that mission was.

Apparently, the U.S. had compelling evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that they intended to use against the U.S. — or possibly give said weapons to al-Qaeda (to whom Iraq was supposedly linked). At least, that’s what they kept telling us.

A British newspaper, The Independent, has revealed that most if not all of the “evidence” supplied by the “Commander in Chief” and his helpers was fabricated:

“A high-level UK source said last night that intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were furious that briefings they gave political leaders were distorted in the rush to war with Iraq. ‘They ignored intelligence assessments which said Iraq was not a threat,’ the source said. Quoting an editorial in a Middle East newspaper which said, ‘Washington has to prove its case. If it does not, the world will for ever believe that it paved the road to war with lies,’ he added: ‘You can draw your own conclusions.’ ”

The Washington Post reported on May 11 that the 75th Exploitation Task Force (the U.S. team charged with finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction) “is dismantling its operations for a likely departure at the beginning of June, after failing to find any biological and chemical weapons.”

Members of the team were quoted as saying that “they no longer expected to find such stocks, and that they had consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate.” According to the BBC, “US Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites — only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top ‘non-WMD sites,’ without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success. ‘Why aren’t we doing any planned targets?’ said Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha. ‘Answer me that. We know they’re empty.’ ”

Still, the Bush administration continues to insist that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Only last week, ABC News reported that “Nine weeks after the U.S.-led war with Iraq, U.S. officials still have no proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but remain convinced that Saddam Hussein had the capability to make them.” When confronted by the absence of evidence to back up their excuse for going to war, officials deny ever having made the claims. For example, Slate juxtaposes the following two quotes for full effect:

  • Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, May 14, “I don’t believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.”
  • Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” March 16, “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

But, as Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson points out:

“We don’t hear much about these justifications any more, largely because they were as bogus then as now. The Americans are scouring Iraq for these weapons. They have their own intelligence sources, now enhanced by more information from captured Iraqis. They have the UN weapons inspectors’ reports. So far, nothing âe¦ Far from making the Middle East less volatile, and U.S. citizens and interests safer at home and abroad, the ‘liberation’ has heightened insecurity. The perverse irony is that, rather than being penalized for this heightened insecurity, Mr. Bush profits from it, such is the state of opinion and the level of analysis in his country.”

In other words, the Bush administration knew all along that Iraq had disarmed after the first Gulf War. As opponents of the war suggested all along, it was all about oil.

It was also about using a manufactured war to get Americans to support a President with no real domestic agenda and a disastrous record on the economy. Call it a weapon of mass distraction.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...