Letter to the editor

Not a credible president

To the Editor:

Michelle Dubert's article regarding the war in Iraq ("Hypocritical allegations on Iraqi WMD," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 2/2/04) calls the Democrats hypocritical for challenging the president's use of intelligence. Democrats, as well as Republicans, saw the evidence presented by President Bush. Democrats trusted that this would be a fair presentation of the facts. Legitimate questions now arise as to the administration's willingness to disregard the real concerns within the intelligence community concerning this evidence.

When 77 senators voted in favor of the Iraq resolution, they did not vote "in favor of a pre-emptive strike," as Dubert suggests. It was an authorization for the president to do what was necessary to halt any threat to the United States. Iraq was never the threat the administration portrayed it as; Iraq never possessed the mobile biological weapons laboratories, chemical weapon-dispersing unmanned aircraft or significant nuclear programs so presented. Until a few weeks ago, Vice President Dick Cheney was claiming that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. President Bush went so far as to claim in the State of the Union address that Iraq still had "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" when we invaded, when the evidence is to the contrary. The administration must own up to the fact that it relied on faulty information and dubious intelligence as a cause for war. It also must explain why the intelligence presented to the American people, and to the world, seemed so concrete, when it was far from it.

The American people were presented with a very specific case for war. This was the "grave and gathering threat" posed by Iraq to the United States, due to its supposedly extensive WMD program. This is what Democrats and Republicans voted on; this is what many in America were told. This was the justification for changing decades of American foreign policy and sacrificing our credibility in the global community.

President Bush has put America into a very difficult situation. On the one hand, he claimed that the reason we went to war was to stop the gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When this argument proved to be faulty, his position shifted; he claimed that he went to war in order to free the Iraqi people. I am afraid that the true causes of the administration's want for war will never be discovered.

The president has called for an investigation into this intelligence debacle, but it falls short in many ways. The saliency of the Iraq debacle has been undermined by a mandate which focuses on intelligence as a whole. The panel is clearly partisan in nature, having no Democratic elected officials. And the administration refuses to demand that this committee report its findings until after the November election. Is this merely an election-year ploy, or is President Bush actually interested in discovering the truth?

The question that now stands before America is not where and how this began, but where America will stand in the future. In order for our nation to be credible as a harbinger of peace and democracy, we must have a president who is not only credible amongst other leaders, but is also credible to his or her own people. President Bush fails on both accounts.

Daniel De Rosa

The writer is the Political Outreach Chairman of the Penn Democrats.

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