THE Question Of The Day

Not only WHY are we in Iraq, but—more importantly—how do we get OUT? William Raspberry gets to the heart of the matter. If this is (fair & balanced) Vietnam-syndrome, so be it.

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The Question We Should Be Asking
By William Raspberry

I suppose I should be more interested in what is (or was last week) the question of the day: Did our government have reason to know that something like Sept. 11 would happen and, if so, who failed to take appropriate preventive action?

But I can't get past the previous question: Why are we in Iraq?

The reason I can't get worked up about the question that dominated last week's hearings before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is pragmatic. Suppose we had been pretty sure that the al Qaeda network had something in mind, but we weren't sure what. What would have been an appropriate response? To heighten security at the World Trade Center, which, after all, had been targeted in a terrorist attack in 1993? To step up security at all very tall buildings in America? To intensify security everywhere?

Even supposing our intelligence suggested something involving airplanes, what might we have done? If we knew flight numbers, we could cancel those flights (or run every passenger through a particularly thorough screening). But without that specific knowledge, should we have shut down certain airports? All airports? For how long?

The flap over who ignored the terror warnings leaves me feeling as I do when the Homeland Security Department ups the threat level from yellow to orange. Just what am I supposed to do?

And so I return to the question I've been worrying over for more than a year: the war in Iraq. I wish they'd form a commission to answer my questions. Was a naive President Bush duped into war by those in his administration who had a deeper purpose? Or was Bush himself calling the shots while members of his administration scrambled to provide the necessary pretext?

I had tended toward the Bush-as-puppet theory, primarily because of the president's preelection incuriosity about the rest of the world, and because certain members of his administration were on record as having a keen interest in rearranging the Middle East.

But now a second former member of the Bush administration is painting a picture of a president for whom Sept. 11 was merely a convenient pretext for making war on Saddam Hussein.

Richard A. Clarke, who was Bush's counterterrorism coordinator, recalls in his newly published memoir that Bush pulled him aside the day after the attacks and told him, "Go back over everything, everything; see if Saddam did this."

Reminded that all available intelligence showed al Qaeda to be behind the attacks, Clarke writes, the president said: "I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Then as the still-resisting Clarke left the room, he says, the president said -- "testily" -- a third time: "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

This account comes after former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's assertion (in Ron Suskind's book) that the president was planning from the very first days of his administration to get rid of Hussein.

Did key White House advisers conspire to get the president fixated on Hussein, or was the fixation the president's own?

And even as I ask the question, I have to acknowledge that the answer doesn't really matter -- for two reasons.

First, I don't imagine that President Bush, no matter how misguided I believe him to be, would have acted as he did in Iraq if he hadn't truly believed it to be in America's interest. Second, just as the question of who knew and failed to act before Sept. 11 has become largely irrelevant, so has the question of how we wound up in Iraq.

The fact is, we're there -- and no one I know would suggest that we simply turn and leave the Iraqis to the chaos we've largely created.

The real question (though I'd love to see it preceded by an honest confession or two) is: How the devil do we get out?

Is there a commission for that?

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