E.L. Doctorow had Iraq facts wrong at Hofstra

Author E.L. Doctorow took some boos and a few cheers during his Hofstra University commencement speech, in which he criticized President Bush for the removal of fascist dictator Saddam Hussein and for moving Iraq toward democracy.

Doctorow accused Bush of using fiction to justify Saddam’s removal. “Sadly they are not good stories this president tells,” he said Sunday (May 23). “They are not good stories because they are not true.”

This is when the booing started. And perhaps Doctorow’s own dishonesty earned those boos.

“One story he [Bush] told was that the country of Iraq had nuclear and biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and was intending shortly to use them on us,” Doctorow told the Hofstra graduates and their parents.

Doctorow delivered only a smidgeon of truth there. Bush and the leaders of every other industrialized nation did say Saddam had biological and chemical weapons. This claim appears to have been wrong, though it’s possible such weapons will someday be discovered.

But contrary to Doctorow’s speech, Bush never said Saddam had nuclear weapons. And Bush never said Saddam intended “shortly” to use his illegal weapons on the United States. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said he could not tell when Saddam might use weapons against us.

Saddam was required by the United Nations to prove he had no illegal weapons by showing the U.N. inspectors what he did with the ones he had in 1998. Saddam did not meet that requirement. Doctorow ignores that fact.

Doctorow said the alleged claim that Saddam intended “shortly” to use his weapons of mass destruction “was an exciting story all right, it was designed to send shivers up our spines. But it was not true.” Well, Mr. Doctorow, a claim never really made can’t be untrue, can it? On the other hand, claims you actually made at Hofstra are untrue.

Not only had Bush told no one that Saddam was about to strike us “shortly,” we Americans weren’t feeling shivers up our spines over Saddam's danger. Only Saddam’s innocent Iraqi victims were suffering the shivers of fear - and worse - over Saddam’s propensity for routine torture and murder.

“Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in league with the terrorists of al Qaida,” Doctorow said. “And that turned out to be not true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of these stories.”

Bush’s principal accusation on Saddam’s ties to terrorism was that he harbored and supported terrorists, in violation of several U.N. resolutions. Bush never argued that Saddam had any part in al Qaida's Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Bush did note that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaida ally suspected in the recent beheading of Nick Berg, lived and trained at least in semi-autonomous northern Iraq while Saddam still was in power. Whether Saddam actively supported Zarqawi is not known, but Zarqawi was welcome enough to receive hospital care in Baghdad in spring 2002.

Saddam also allowed Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, notorious (non-al Qaida) terrorists in their own right, to live in Iraq, and he regularly paid off the families of terrorists who killed Israelis in suicide bombings.

As far as the assertion that “we went off to war on the basis of these stories,” Doctorow presents a conclusion as false as his premises.

Bush justifed the liberation of Iraq on the basis of several incontrovertible truths:

- That Saddam had not documented the destruction of his illegal weapons.

- That Saddam had violated the 1991 cease fire by refusing to return nearly 600 prisoners of war to Kuwait (they probably were murdered).

- That Saddam supported terrorists.

- That Saddam siphoned cash from the U.N. Oil for Food program, allowing Iraqis to die as a result.

Doctorow also ignored the most important basis for forcing Saddam from power: Saddam’s own record of tyranny. How did Doctorow miss this? How is it that men of imagination know of Iraq’s mass graves with hundreds of thousands of victims, and yet they can’t imagine how all those bodies got there?

When Bush went to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, the first item he cited as proof that Saddam was an international outlaw was Saddam’s relentless violation of U.N. Resolution 688.

Resolution 688, passed in 1991, required that Saddam stop repressing and mistreating the Iraqi people. Saddam never stopped repressing and mistreating the Iraqi people. And by the time he was brought down, Saddam held the world record among living dictators for deaths by war, genocide and state-ordered murder.

Bush’s 2003 invasion stopped Saddam's massive abuses. Doctorow would not have stopped Saddam.

Now that Saddam is ousted, Doctorow is free to pretend there was no good reason to liberate Iraq. He'll have to excuse us if we don't cheer when he tells us his fiction is fact.

Frank Warner

Comments

[(gay)travis t monk]

"Another story was that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was in league with the terrorists of al-Qaida," he said. "And that turned out to be not true. But anyway we went off to war on the basis of these stories." that seem's to be true.

[jj]

No one goes to war for a single reason. We went to war because the Bush administration made an overall assessment of the World’s future and decided that we had to act. A future with Saddam the Terrible and his wicked children, steadily growing stronger at our expense, compares badly to even the current state of chaos. We had lost the containment battle. The Europeans were betraying us and Saddam was more that capable of pursuing his monomaniacal plans. Sooner or later we were going to loosen our grip. Americans were largely opposed to the containment effort, and it was, in fact, ineffective and cruel in practice. If the Iraqis have any reason to hate us, it is because we betrayed the Shiites after Gulf War I, and because we allowed the oil-for-food program, a cornucopia of suffering and corruption, to go on for so long. If GB-41 had gone to Baghdad when he had the chance, the chorus of regrets would have been largely ceremonial, and the Palestinians might have their own state today.

In order to sell the war to the Europeans, and to us, W used the minimum arguments that were most widely agreed upon. If he was wrong -- not yet determined -- it was only in the timing, and he was not alone in his opinions. Saddam may not have had the WMD then, but he would eventually. Saddam might not have been Osama’s pen pal, but it was only a matter of time. There were definite indications of terrorist related issues.

The chaos will eventually dissipate and Iraq will be a free nation.

[Captain Yossarian]

Lets get this straight - we need the oil and we need to keep it flowing safely. Yes - for gas for your liberal soccer mom SUVs and for your girlie-men porsches and bmws - real men drive Corvettes!

Finally, we have a large numebr of soldiers and supplies in Iraq and Afganistan. The Oil is safe and will stay cheap as long as we need it. And guess what you liberals - becasue we got there, we won't need to drillin Alaska! Now who says Bush is not an environmentalista.

And this time lets be carful who we give a purple heart to - some of these guys will do anything, even risk their lives, just to get a purple heart so that they can come off as heroes when they run for an election later.