How the Bush administration co-opted 9/11 to invade Iraq

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

A Peace Front interview with Becky Lourey, Part 3.

In this, the final segment of my riveting interview with gold-star mother and former legislator Becky Lourey, we come full circle, back to the Iraq conflict that took the life of Becky’s son Matt. At the time of his death in 2005, Lourey was the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. to lose a child in combat—a grim irony, given her track record as a lifelong peace activist.

Q: Becky, we’ve been discussing a little-known conservative think-tank group called The Project for the New American Century, established in 1997. It published a White Paper three months before George W. Bush took office. In this position paper, the group observed that it would be difficult to get the American public to go along with necessary military actions in the Middle East, “in the absence of a galvanizing event such as Pearl Harbor.” That’s a direct quote from the paper. What is your take-away on that statement?

A: On September 11, 2001, they clearly got their “galvanizing event.” In fact, much of what President Bush laid out as the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” on September 20th, just nine days after 9/11, parallels or directly borrows from the White Paper written by the Project for the New American Century.

Q: So you are saying that these plans were outlined well before the Bush administration took command?

A: Yes. And these plans have, coincidentally or not, come to be implemented. As we know from Paul O’Neill, the first Secretary of the Treasury in the new Bush administration, one of the first items for discussion in the very first meeting of the new Bush cabinet in January of 2001 was a plan for the invasion of Iraq.

• As events have shown, none of the so-called ‘good’ reasons given for the invasion of Iraq were accurate. The accusations of possession of weapons of mass destruction, imminent threat to neighboring countries, nuclear weapons program, yellowcake from Niger, harboring terrorists—none have turned out to be true.

Q: Why then did we invade?

A: I will leave it to you to decide if you think there are real reasons, and if so, what they might be. As for me, I believe that the war in Iraq is not unlike those that have defined much of human history. My son Matt, on his second tour of duty in Iraq, used to write me emails from there. In them, my son made it clear the war was connected to a resource called oil. And for that commodity, he paid with his life—as have thousands of other fine young servicemen and women.

Q: What about the legal aspect of our actions?

A: I firmly believe there is no legal basis for this war, either. It is, in fact, in violation of every generally agreed-upon tenet of International law. Under the current international law agreements defined by the United Nations Charter, to which we are a signatory, the use of preventive international force is restricted to the Security Council alone. Individual nation states are permitted to use international force only in self-defense. There is no possibility that a war for resource acquisition could be seen to be in self-defense or in any way preventive.

• I direct you to an article written by David Allen Larson, Professor of Law and Senior Fellow at Hamline University School of Law, published in the Journal of International and Comparative Law, where he examines United Kingdom Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith’s March 7, 2005, memorandum to Prime Minister Tony Blair in which Lord Goldsmith asserts that no right to use force preemptively exists in international law.

Q: Are there other ways in which we have “lost” this conflict?

A: Yes. By going into Iraq illegally, our nation has lost the trust

of other nations. The concept of trust is so difficult–and yet so necessary for peaceful relationships. We had the sympathy of the entire world after 9/11; that has been totally squandered. Losing the trust of others compromises partnerships. The United States may still be the most militarily powerful nation on earth, but that power does not necessarily translate into an ability to control events.

Q: A final question. What is your perspective on a professional standing army versus a military draft that would subject all of our nation’s young men (and perhaps women) to potential participation in American wars?

A: It breaks my heart that our soldiers are sent to war by those who have never fought themselves, by those whose own children are rarely subject to serving in our armed forces. Those who make the decisions today to go to war rarely experience the reality of their own offspring having to face the life-and-death jeopardy of the battlefield.

Their own children can also afford to attend college. For these reasons, I believe we should either reinstitute the draft or implement a mandatory two years of service for all of our youth which would include Peace Corps and National Service options. One positive result of this action would be that our children would have a greater understanding of the world in which they live.

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Our deepest thanks for your thoughts and courageous actions on behalf of our nation, Becky. And for your insights and untiring efforts to set the record straight. Our deepest thanks for your thoughts and courageous actions on behalf of our nation, Becky. And for your insights and untiring efforts to set the record straight.