If this war was indeed a war of self-protection launched by a country wounded by the attacks of 9/11, the feeling motivating such a war would be fear. But if the impulse behind this war was empire-building, the motivating feeling would be not fear but an arrogant lust for power.
So, did the lead-up to this war look like defense or offense?
Had their real concerns been "the war on terror" would the Bush administration have been so indifferent about damaging our key relationships with other nations?
Does not their reckless mangling of our major alliances lead us to infer that "the war on terror" was not really uppermost in their minds, but was rather used as a justification -a cover""for other ambitions?
And as for the spirit behind those ambitions, one can look at how this president and vice president behaved in the period of nearly a year leading up to the invasion of Iraq. In their public statements, they gave us clear clues in the readily accessible language of basic human behavior.
Their conduct was arrogant, not fearful.
For months, they assumed an aggressive posture not only toward Iraq but toward the world generally. And for the international order they showed a feeling bordering on contempt.
When the president-under pressure from the public statements from his father's former chief national security aides-- finally decided to acknowledge that order, and go to speak to the United Nations, his demeanor was entirely presumptuous and boastful. Far from soliciting their help in a spirit likely to elicit it, he lectured and chastised the other nations of the world.
Is this the conduct of someone worried about a threat? Or does it bespeak someone who is filled with a sense of his own unmatched power?
To ask the question is to answer it. The spirit animating the drive to war wasn't hidden, but was right there again and again on the evening news, as the story unfolded. And that spirit was not a fearful one but that of an arrogant bully.
The fundamental lie, the clues suggest, was not about WMDs or Saddam's link to terrorism. The important lie, rather, would be about the deeper question of whether Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted this war to protect us from a threat or whether they wanted it to expand their empire.
If the leaders of the United States lied to the American people to frighten us about our security so that they could extend their dominance of the world, shame on them.
And, if we let them get away with it, shame on us.
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