A war without a cause

The mystery as to why President Bush ordered invasion of Iraq has deepened with the release of a US Senate Intelligence Committee report. Was it the Iraqi oil that the United States wanted or may be the invasion was launched at the behest of the American 'military-industrial complex' which plotted yet another war to remain in business?
But the explanation then offered by the Bush administration - that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons and that he was only a year away from finishing work on a nuclear bomb - finds no endorsement. The Senate committee report also rejects Bush administration's claim that the Iraqi dictator was colluding with al Qaeda and had offered his country as safe haven for training of the extremists.
"It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion," says the New York Times. How come, asks the newspaper, President Bush did not know that "important claims he made did not conform with intelligence reports". "In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers".
Iraq war is still raging with full fury as blood flows in the streets of this biblical land. Tens of thousands of non-combatant innocent Iraqi citizens have been killed and many more disabled. The casualties suffered by the invading forces are no less stunning; about four thousand American troops have lost their lives for a cause as disputed as the Senate report suggests.
Iraq had a nuclear programme some twenty years ago but it was killed in its infancy when the Israeli air force took out its only reactor in a surprise attack. But as the US prepared for war, President Bush and his team insisted that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
To prove this assertion the then secretary of state, Colin Powell, made a presentation at the United Nations, showing sketch of make-believe mobile reactor he said Saddam Hussein was using to manufacture nuclear bomb. That Iraq had also biological and chemical weapons, not much was required to establish the allegation - given that Saddam's air force had bombed Halebja, a border town close to Iranian border, with poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war.
Equally preposterous were the claims that Saddam Hussein colluded with al Qaeda. The fact is that during the dictator's time a practising Muslim was treated as a suspect, mosques were locked and in the history books then authored, Islamic period figured only marginally.
Some Islamic symbols were reintroduced only after he went to war with Iran over the Shatt-al-Arab (at American instigation), to incite an otherwise non-co-operative Iraqi population. He had the national flag inscribed with words 'Allah-o-Akbar' and constructed a new 'tomb of the unknown soldier' showing two huge hands raised in prayer, substituting the sarcophagus encasing the soldier's blood.
The Senate report covers Iraq, but there is something that Pakistan should learn from it. And that is that the US administration is quite capable of building up an excuse to justify its military operation. Who knows why there is this rant about Osama bin Laden hiding somewhere in rugged mountains of Pakistan's north-west, and that Pakistan's nuclear weapons can fall in wrong hands.
But we believe, as truth is catching up the Bush administration in Iraq, the American people would be able to see through the fog of propaganda about militancy in Pakistan and ask their government to stop massacre of innocent unarmed residents of Fata.
Let the US Senate hold a probe into war in Afghanistan. There too an immense human tragedy is infolding. Thousands of Afghans have perished and the number of foreign troops, who surely are fighting for as dubious a cause as in Iraq, is also rising by the day.