A mother of a dead soldier sat camped in Crawford, Texas. She wants President Bush to define the “noble cause” that he said her son died for.
The initial reasons we were given for invading Iraq was because it hadn’t complied with UN weapons inspections and we needed to find and destroy Iraq’s WMDs – those pesky, still-unfound chemical and biological weapons that would do us harm. (Interesting though that we didn’t much care about them when they were being used against the Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war or against the Kurds in northern Iraq.)
As more and more weapon caches were found and more and more of the country searched with no WMDs in sight, the reason for the invasion seemed to shift a bit – we needed to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein so that Iraqis wouldn’t be so oppressed… mission creep number one.
Then, once Saddam was toppled, the war became a part of “spreading democracy” across the globe… mission creep number two.
Now, it is a war against insurgents... mission creep number three. And Iraq has become the “central front” in the war on terror… mission creep number four.
Huh?
How can the reason or reasons for conducting a preemptive strike against another country change after the fact?
Even the first President Bush understood this, when he and Brent Skowcroft wrote in a 1998 Time magazine article, “Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.”
Those incalculable costs are now happening daily. The WMD reason we went to war appears to have been based on incorrect information. A brutal dictator sits awaiting trial, in a country that is barely holding itself together, but we are now going in so many directions – rebuilding, fighting unknown and unseen enemies, conducting gas-bootlegging, providing safeguarding and security in some areas – that the war has become a quagmire.
Whether one supported the invasion is now immaterial. It is time to remember why we started it – for that will also tell us that it should be over. Now.
Time for the troops to come home. Their initial mission – before all the mission creep – is over.
--Written in collaboration with Jennifer Hicks