Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Moreover, Hussein bent over backward to show the world that he had fully disarmed of all such weapons. Iraq released an exhaustive 12,000-page report pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which required full disclosure of all arms programs. It approved U-2 reconnaissance flights over the country. From 2002 onward, Hussein permitted UN weapons inspectors full access to all requested sites, and no prohibited activities were stumbled upon at any of them.  No fermenting agents necessary for the production of biological weapons were found. Furthermore, Iraq performed two gestures of goodwill: it destroyed seventy-two of its one hundred Al Samoud 2 missiles, which were of questionable legality, and Saddam Hussein accepted the suggestion to give a televised speech declaring that Iraq had completely abandoned its WMD projects. By all accounts, Iraq had become fully disarmed of all weapons of mass destruction.

Now I would like to address the second part of Hannity's excerpt, which is closely related to the first. If Saddam Hussein had been preparing to annihilate several cities in the United States, our invasion of his country could perhaps have been justified somehow. But Hussein's guilt in orchestrating such a plot has never been proven--because the plot never existed. Indeed, no foreign country except Russia (which has a lot of leftover nuclear weapons from former Soviet satellite states) would dare to be so reckless as to attack the US with nuclear weapons because our quantity of such bombs far exceeds the number possessed by any other country (10,000 versus approximately 1,000 possessed by all nuclear-armed countries combined except Russia). The only beneficial result of our invasion of Iraq is the removal of Saddam Hussein from power--but that objective could have been accomplished in a mission by Special Agents of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, who could have snuck into Iraq, arrested him and transferred him to the International Criminal Court, where he would been tried for crimes against humanity and received just punishment.

In 2004 when Hannity wrote this book, it might have been possible to delude oneself into thinking that the war in Iraq was beneficial to the Iraqi people and to our country. But with the perspective offered by more than four years, that illusion has been shattered. Iraq has been transformed from a relatively peaceful and prosperous nation into a Third World country. It is a veritable sinkhole of "Islamic" terrorism that puts the entire Palestinian terrorist record against Israel to shame; what's more, it has drawn foreign terrorists from countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran to perpetrate terrorist attacks against Iraqi Sunni Muslims and American personnel. Dozens of hospitals, mosques, schools, and homes have been destroyed by our zealous anti-terrorist campaigns. Anarchy is so prevalent that Iraqis are in constant fear for their lives and hesitate to even go shopping. Rampant corruption has stalled the rebuilding efforts of the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose members pilfered $9 billion of $11 billion granted by our government for rebuilding. Illnesses from dysentery to kidney stones are widespread due to poor sanitation and water pollution. The poverty rate reached 50 percent in 2006, while unemployment is above 60 percent and inflation had soared to 80 percent by late 2006. All these grave problems have internally displaced some four million Iraqis and provoked a steady exodus of about 1,000 people per day (half of which are Christians) to Syria, Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

"Our invasion was a beneficial thing" only for petroleum executives, military manufacturers, and other big business tycoons. However, the war in Iraq has been seriously harmful for the people of Iraq, for America, and for the world. It has tarnished our image as a responsible, caring and upright nation, replacing it with an image of the United States as an aggressive den of thieves. And it has threatened the peace of the world.