American War Criminals

The Middle East was heating up. Muslim groups were fighting with other Muslim groups. Oil resources were being debated. World leaders were whispering about the impending threat of “weapons of mass destruction” being produced in Iraq despite various UN Security council resolutions to prohibit it.

Feeling pressure to unseat Saddam Hussein from his position of power, the President of the United States sought funding from the U.S. Congress to set into motion an effort to replace Saddam's regime with a democracy. Specifically the act put before Congress requested the use of United States Armed Forces to pull of this large and risky effort.

The President had few international friends. To gain a tactical advantage the U.S. hoped to use various Middle East countries to base their entry into Iraq, but those countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates initially denied the request. It seems that the U.S. would primarily have to count on the United Kingdom as it's near sole support, advocate, friend and military partner.

The act approved by Congress gave the President the means to drawdown defense articles and assign resources for the purpose of going into Iraq to fundamentally perform the goal of unseating a violent, hostile and non-compliant sanctioned Iraqi regime. Some saw risk in assigning that sort of power to a president while others saw it as a reasonable act in times of war.

The U.S. President's administration was actively engaged in ensuring people of the world knew what we were up against and what was at stake.

“The weapons of mass destruction are the threat of the future. I think the president explained very clearly to the American people that this is the threat of the 21^st century,” said the administration's Secretary of State.

A plan was in place. Congress had been briefed. The American people were informed. It was nearly time to go in. The known tactical targets: weapons research and development installations, air defense systems, weapon and supply depots, barracks and command headquarters of Saddam's elite Republican Guard, along with Saddam's lavish presidential palaces.

For a while then there were musings about the U.S. Military taking impending action in Iraq and despite the common objections to warmongering by certain elements of the American public as well as the world, it was time to go into Iraq.

In December of 1998 Operation Desert Fox was set into motion by then-President Bill Clinton.

Unless you were aware of this piece of recent world history, my guess is that you were thinking about a completely different U.S. President and war.

How long have you attributed military action in defiance of the UN and world opinion, warmongering, WMD threat and Congressional support for misinformed action in Iraq to President Bush only now to realize that President Clinton has more to do with the writing of this story than you would have ever imagined?

WMDs were a threat then according to the UN and various intelligence sources, even though Clinton's raid on Bagdad yielded no WMDs. Was President Clinton simply wrong about WMDs or should we run out and print “CLINTON LIED” bumper-stickers? It was rumored that U.S. Inspectors under Clinton sabotaged Iraqi relations and inspections to provoke the Bagdad bombing. Should we go back and talk about releasing those documents and prosecuting the Clinton Administration as war criminals?

As a direct result of the failed Bagdad bombing effort former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, “We did not do, in my view, enough damage to degrade [Iraq's programs for weapons and mass destruction]... because in six months to a year they will be back to where they are and we cannot keep repeating these attacks. At the end of the day what will be decisive is what the situation in the Middle East will be in two or three years... If Saddam is still there, if he's rearming, if sanctions are lifted, we have lost, no matter what spin we put on it.”

As a direct result of the President Clinton's Bagdad bombing, the Islamist group Vanguards of Conquest called for attacks on the US “for it's arrogance.”

The fact is, this is all very complicated stuff. Someone selling platitudes about “he lied” or “prosecute the war criminal administration” are simply evoking emotional ploys rather than discussing facts (or whatever we can glean from history that seems close enough to fact.)

I am not in a rush to condemn former President Bill Clinton, but I think people need to get down off their historically inaccurate high-horses and stop the very narrow propaganda that crucifies former President George W. Bush. I am not saying he didn't make mistakes. I am saying that you don't have to go back too many Presidents to find perfectly similar examples of admirable and embarrassing mistakes, liberal or conservative.

Note: My telling of this story comes from a retelling of the wikipedia article on Operation Desert Fox. You can fact-check the story starting there. Feel free to leave comments.

UPDATE:

After President Obama's Afghanistan address last night, I will watch public reaction closely. I fully anticipate a spectrum of responses from military families encouraged by support, to families fearfully anticipating deployment of their family members, from feeling confident in the President's explained approach in Afghanistan to seeing this as more of the same business-as-usual regardless of President Obama's campaign promises on war efforts in the Middle East.

Is President Obama's selected military option enough? Some say it is a move in the right direction but because it is not equal to the demands of the Afghan war-front it doesn't have a large chance for success. We can only hope that if they will send more people into the fray, it surely has a significant chance of working. In President Obama's own words, "As your Commander and Chief I owe you a mission that is clearly defined."

President Obama also said, "it is in our vital national interest to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan... I do not make this decision lightly... if I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow... I am convinced that our security is at stake... this is the epicenter... this is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat."

Now that President Obama is making these tough decisions, we will see how the polarized political response to the demands of national security, many of which got him elected because of his outspoken desire to bring the troops home, will either support him or begin to name President Obama and his administration as one of the American War Criminals.