Lies My President Told

When we last left our intrepid heroes, George W. Bush and posse, they were riding high on what seemed like total victory in Iraq. On May 1, Bush declared the "end of major combat operations," meaning the war was over and the news crews could all go home now. Sure, there were some loose ends to tie up, like the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein, the electricity in Baghdad, and the location of those pesky weapons of mass destruction (any day now, folks). But the statue of Saddam had been toppled, the troops would soon be home, and democracy would flourish in Iraq.
Well, Bush lied.

Over the summer, nearly every one of the stated justifications for the war began to erode. The story about Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Niger? Phony intelligence. Tony Blair's claim that Iraq could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes? A flat-out lie. Connections to al-Qaeda? Still no evidence. The mobile weapons labs that Colin Powell was so sure Iraq was hiding? Well, we never actually saw those to begin with, but after five months in Iraq, we still haven't gotten past the artist's rendering that was shown to the U.N.

There are plenty of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq--unexploded cluster bombs, thousands of tons of munitions tipped with carcinogenic depleted uranium, even napalm. The only problem is that everything has little American flags on it.

More than 100 days after the "end" of the war, Iraq is a nightmare. While temperatures soar to 115 degrees, most Iraqis still have no reliable power and water supply. No power means no fans, air conditioners or refrigerators. It also means no water, since (as those of us who experienced the Blackout of 2003 discovered) water filtration plants need electricity. There were riots in Basra in the middle of August over--of all absurdities--a gasoline shortage. A country that is floating on a sea of oil actually imported refined oil products last month because so many refineries had either been bombed, stripped by looters or had no electricity to run on.

Added to the horrid conditions of daily life are the atrocities routinely carried out by U.S. and British troops. The story of thirteen-year-old Haded abd al-Kerim is just one of many. She was shot with her father, brother, and sister at a checkpoint when U.S. soldiers panicked during one of Baghdad's many blackouts. Her mother, eight months pregnant, miraculously survived.

"We never did anything to the Americans and they killed us," Mrs. abd al-Kerim told the British newspaper The Guardian. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family,' but they kept shooting." When her brother tried to take members of the family to the hospital, American soldiers pointed their guns at him. "We could see the other girls and their brother lying on the back seat of the car. They would not let us go to the hospital," he told The Guardian. U.S. soldiers eventually took Mr. abd al-Kerim and one of his daughters to the hospital, but they died shortly thereafter. According to doctors, they could have survived if they received medical attention sooner.

These are the conditions that have produced the Iraqi resistance. Although the increasingly frequent attacks on U.S. troops are usually portrayed as the work of "Ba'ath party loyalists," the truth is that the vast majority of Iraqis want the U.S. troops to leave, because they know that the U.S. is not in Iraq for democracy, but for oil and empire.

Everything the antiwar movement said all along--that the war wasn't about weapons of mass destruction, that it was about oil, that the U.S. wouldn't bring democracy to Iraq--have been proven right. Sadly, they have been proven right at the cost of dozens of American lives and many, many more Iraqi lives.

As the occupation drags on at the cost of $1 billion per week, more and more Americans are beginning to question its rationale. A recent poll taken by Newsweek revealed that sixty-nine percent of Americans were concerned that the U.S. was getting bogged down in Iraq. In the South--from which a disproportionate number of combat troops are drawn--42 percent of the population and 72 percent of blacks say they question whether the war was worth it. And problems in Iraq are eroding Bush's popularity--for the first time, a majority of people polled by Zogby say they would prefer "someone new" to another four years of Bush.

The lies are exposed. A growing number of people are beginning to realize that this occupation is not working.

Laura Durkay is a Columbia College senior majoring in history.