In the months that followed, administration officials began to draw up the war plan and develop a plausible rationale for the war. Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department during this period, said recently that "the agenda was not whether Iraq, but how." Haass said the actual decision to go to war had been made in July 2002. He had questioned the wisdom of war with Iraq at that time, but National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told him, "Essentially ... that decision's been made. Don't waste your breath."

It was Vice President Cheney who outlined to the country the case against Iraq that he had undoubtedly been making to President Bush all along. On Aug. 26, 2002, in an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the vice president argued against U.N. inspections in Iraq and announced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, meaning chemical and biological weapons. He also said: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction. Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon." Those were Cheney's words.

It is now plain what was happening: The drumbeat for war was sounding, and it drowned out those who believed that Iraq posed no imminent threat. On Aug. 29, just two days after Cheney's speech, President Bush signed off on the war plan.

On Sept. 12, the president addressed the United Nations and said: "Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents and has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." He told the United Nations that Iraq would be able to build a nuclear weapon "within a year," if Saddam acquired nuclear material.

President Bush was focusing on Iraq and Saddam, even though one year after the attack on our country, bin Laden was still nowhere to be found. A sixth bin Laden tape had been aired, and news reports of the time revealed new military threats in Afghanistan. U.S. and Afghan military and intelligence officials were quoted as saying that al-Qaida had established two main bases inside Pakistan. An Afghan military intelligence chief said: "al-Qaida has regrouped, together with the Taliban, Kashmiri militants, and other radical Islamic parties, and they are just waiting for the command to start operations."

Despite the obvious al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan, the White House had now made Iraq our highest national security priority. The steamroller of war was moving into high gear. The politics of the timing is obvious. September 2002. The hotly contested 2002 election campaigns were entering the home stretch. Control of Congress was clearly at stake. Republicans were still furious over the conversion of Sen. Jim Jeffords that had cost them control of the Senate in 2001. Election politics prevailed, but they should not have prevailed over foreign policy and national security.

The decision on Iraq could have been announced earlier. Why time it for September? As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained on Sept. 7, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

That was the bottom line. War in Iraq was a war of choice, not a war of necessity. It was a product they were methodically rolling out. There was no imminent threat, no immediate national security imperative, and no compelling reason for war.

In public, the administration continued to deny that the president had made the decision to actually go to war. But the election timetable was clearly driving the marketing of the product. The administration insisted that Congress vote to authorize the war before it adjourned for the November elections. Why? Because the debate in Congress would distract attention from the troubled economy and the troubled effort to capture bin Laden. The strategy was to focus on Iraq, and do so in a way that would divide the Congress. And it worked.

To keep the pressure on, President Bush spoke in Cincinnati on Iraq's nuclear weapons program, just three days before the congressional vote. He emphasized the ties between Iraq and al-Qaida. He emphasized Saddam's access to weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons. He said, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed ... Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists."

The scare tactics worked. Congress voted to authorize the use of force in October 2002. Republicans voted almost unanimously for war and kept control of the House in the election in November. Democrats were deeply divided and lost their majority in the Senate. The Iraq card had been played successfully. The White House now had control of both houses of Congress as well.

As 2003 began, many in the military and foreign policy communities urged against a rush to war. United Nations weapons inspectors were in Iraq, searching for weapons of mass destruction. Saddam appeared to be contained. There was no evidence that Iraq had been involved in the attacks on 9/11. Many insisted that bin Laden and al-Qaida and North Korea were greater threats, but their concerns were dismissed out of hand.

Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz insisted that Iraq was the issue and that war against Iraq was the only option, with or without international support. They convinced the president that the war would be brief, that American forces would be welcomed as liberators, not occupiers, and that ample intelligence was available to justify going to war.

The gross abuse of intelligence was on full display in the president's State of Union Address last January, when he spoke the now infamous 16 words -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The president did not say that U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with this assessment. He simply and deviously said, "the British government has learned."

As we all now know, that allegation was false. It had already been debunked a year earlier by the U.S. intelligence community. Yet it was included in the president's State of the Union Address. Has any other State of the Union Address ever been so disgraced by such blatant falsehood?

In March 2003, on the basis of a grossly exaggerated threat and grossly inadequate postwar planning, and with little international support, the United States invaded Iraq when we clearly should not have done so.

Major combat operations ended five weeks later. Dressed in a flight suit, the president flew out to an aircraft carrier and proclaimed "Mission Accomplished." It was a nice image for the 2004 campaign, until the facts intruded. The mission was far from accomplished. As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, the image on the aircraft carrier was ridiculed. The administration replaced it with a new image -- the president in Baghdad with cheering troops on Thanksgiving Day. Again, the image-makers stumbled. This time, the image was of the president holding his policy on Iraq -- a turkey.

On a recent visit to Iraq, the writer Lucian Truscott, a 1969 graduate of West Point, spoke with an Army colonel in Baghdad. In an Op-Ed article in the New York Times last month, he wrote that Army officers spoke of feeling that "every order they receive is delivered with next November's election in mind, so there is little doubt at and near the top about who is really being used for what over here."

There is little doubt as well that the administration's plan to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people by this summer -- and the pressure to hold elections in Afghanistan at that time -- are intended to build momentum for the November elections in this country as well.

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