WASHINGTON — Three years after the United States invaded Iraq in pursuit of a freer, more stable Middle East, the country's deepening ethnic conflict is spreading tension across Iraq's borders, fueling terrorism and nurturing gloom about the future.
President Bush cited Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to international terrorism - neither of which turned out to exist - when he ordered a pre-emptive war that began March 19, 2003. He predicted payoffs for the wider Middle East: spreading democracy, deterred enemies, more secure oil flows, a less hostile environment for Israel.
There are a few points I'd like to make about the bolded statement, which I find extremely misleading:
- I won't harp on the WMD's issue too much, but suffice it to say that our troops have found caches of chemical weapons, etc. It is popular among liberals and the media to suggest that Saddam "had no WMD's." That's not accurate. We haven't found them in the quantities we expected, but Saddam did have some. It is a minor point, but one worth mentioning.
- Iraq did have ties to international terrorism. It is an indisputable fact. Even if you want to ignore information coming from masses of documents from Iraq being translated as we speak (information that suggests that Saddam was very interested in international terrorism), you cannot dispute the fact that Saddam was funding suicide bombings in Israel and provided millions of dollars to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the group responsible for the "black September" hijackings in 1970). These are significant ties to international terrorism (and you can find more links here), yet this article in the Grand Forks Herald suggests that they don't exist. That is just flat-out wrong.
- Saying that the invasion of Iraq was just about WMD's and Saddam's ties to terrorism is also inaccurate. On March 22nd, 2003 - as our troops prepared to invade Iraq - the President addressed the American people and told them that "our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people." Freeing the Iraqi people has always been a pillar of our reason for invading Iraq and suggesting that it isn't is, again, flat-out wrong.
We have spent a lot of time talking about the level of trust the public feels for the media. With blatantly inaccurate (and I would suggest agenda-driven) reporting like that above, it is no wonder that level of trust has fallen to record lows.
Nobody is asking the media to be "parrots" for one political point of view or another. All we're asking is that they get this stuff right. Americans base their opinions on what they see in the news. When the news isn't an accurate representation of what is actually going on Americans make the wrong choices.
Update:
A bit of a correction on point #3 as per the comments. The article didn't state that WMD's and terrorism were the only two reasons for invasion. That being said, it did omit the third reasons and that still lends to the overall misleading nature of this article.