"...interviews last week with historians, advertising executives, pollsters and Democratic and Republican image-makers turned up this consensus: Mr. Bush has to do a better job--or at least a more extensive job--of selling Americans on Iraq and the American occupation, no matter what anyone might think of the policy itself." --Elizabeth Bumiller, New York Times, "Hard Sell: In a Democracy, the President Is Also Salesman in Chief"

"Everything that happened yesterday is irrelevant." --Advice for Bush from G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French-born medical anthropologist who has done psychological consumer research for Seagram, Procter & Gamble and Ford, quoted in the same article

A year has passed since Congress authorized George W. Bush to launch a war against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Each of the justifications for the war put forward by the Administration has now proved either entirely imaginary or so remote as to appear fanciful. The President said that the United States must go to war because Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them, but the American team, led by David Kay, sent to discover those weapons has now, after four months of searching, had to report that it has found none. The President said that Saddam gave support to Al Qaeda, but no such support has been demonstrated. The President said he was going to war to establish a democracy in Iraq so splendid that all the Middle East would emulate it (Iraq would be "a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said in February), but six months after the war's end Iraq remains virtually without a government, and resistance to the American occupation is on the rise. The United States has been led into war on false pretexts before. A case in point is the provoked and falsified attacks on American naval vessels in the Tonkin Gulf, which were used to stampede Congress into voting for the Tonkin resolution authorizing the Vietnam War. But never before has an Administration's entire justification for war--not just its triggering incident--proved to be a mirage. (In Vietnam, the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam really were seeking to take over South Vietnam, and did so. In Iraq, by contrast, there really are no known weapons of mass destruction or known support for Al Qaeda.)

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.