Many people who are against the battles we’re fighting in Iraq will insist that, because Iraq has no direct links to 9/11, it is actually a secret, devious war fought purely because George W. Bush had a grudge against Saddam Hussein for his failed assassination attempt on his father (or, maybe it’s just a war to try to lower oil prices, or an attempt to show that he can finish something Daddy couldn’t, or a complicated plot by Bush’s puppet masters, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney).

These people tend to believe that September 11th was the first major event in the War on Terror. In fact, it was one of a long string of these sorts of events, but it was undeniably the biggest of them by far. Terrorist attacks by Al Quaida and similar groups on the United States (and their ally, Israel) have been occurring at an alarming frequency since the early 1980′s, and our response, prior to 9/11, had shown them that this nation hadn’t the courage to fight a war and win it.

I’ve linked it before, but this outline by retired blogger Steven Den Beste does a fine job of explaining the war in general, including the current phase of the War on Terror that is being fought in Iraq.

On Wednesday, Tigerhawk had an excellent piece exploring Stratfor’s George Friedman’s report about the Downing Street Memo. The whole thing is worth reading, and I think it serves as an excellent addition to Den Beste’s “Why Iraq” section of the outline linked above. What I found most intriguing is this excerpt (directly quoted from Friedman’s piece):

The mystery in the document, and the mystery since the summer of 2002, is why Bush almost never used these justifications but clung instead to the weapons of mass destruction rationale. Since it is clear that WMD was not his primary motivator, why did he not come forward with a clear explanation?

The obvious answer is that he did not have a better explanation. That would mean that he had no good reason for invading Iraq — he simply wanted to do so and did. You can pile onto this theories that he wanted to avenge the attempted murder of his father by Iraqi agents, that he is a stupid man who doesn’t think much, or that black helicopters took control of his brain. All of this may be possible. But in looking at Bush and reading this memo, there nowhere emerges an image of a man who thinks like this. There is a willful, unbending man. There is a decisive man who can make substantial mistakes and refuse to concede error. But it is hard to locate the stupid man of myth.

So why doesn’t Bush come plain with his reasoning? Better still, why doesn’t this memo — which cries out for a paragraph in which C explains Bush’s reasoning — contain a word on that? Why isn’t there even a mention that it is not clear what Bush is up to? Everyone in the room knows that WMD is a pretext for war, but the obvious next paragraph — an analysis of Bush’s real reasoning — simply isn’t there.

And not only isn’t that discussion there, but no one in the room seemed to be even curious about it. Either they had the least curiosity of any group of men on earth, or they knew the answer.

We continue to believe the answer is Saudi Arabia.

The comment section of this page is worth a read as well, but I think that this page (and the Den Beste page I linked) make an excellent case for the link between Iraq and the War on Terror, even though Iraq was never connected to the attack on September 11th.

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