The path to war

There seems to be so little interest for the Iraqi situation in the media, now that the war is over. It feels like the international unrest over the starting the war was never really resolved. Still, it seems very quiet in the light of the lack of evidence that Iraqi was substantial and immediate threat.

The New Republic has a detailed but disturbing article on the starting of this war: "The selling of the Iraq war". The data reported seems consistent with the other articles I have read on the subject, but I don't understand how such information could be left aside by the mainstream media. Is there data that contradicts this description of the events?

On Kuro5shin: "Weapons, Lies, and the United States".

I am not very familiar with politics, but being French and ignorant about the Iraqi situation left me wondering and led me to dig the web on this issue. I saw one of Bush's speeches on Iraqi as a threat to the US, but I couldn't find reports or articles bringing proofs and support to these claims.

A friend of mine on the other hand argued that the threat was not the main reason behind the war, instead it was a humanitarian desire of freeing the Iraqi people from their tyrant (maintained as such by the US). I could never find any evidence of this being the root cause for the war, and the reports from the resolution presented to Congress put the threat of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) as being the main factor.

Another friend believed that the real reasons can't be made public and that the decision itself was probably based on classified information that us folks shouldn't know about or wouldn't understand. This never really made sense to me as I would expect the UN to have access to the same information, but they still opposed the war.

It appears, from the result of post-war surveys, that the US people now isn't as sure that war was warranted. The fact that no WMD was found certainly doesn't support Bush's apocalyptic depictions.

So the mystery remains about the true motivations behind this war and only highlights the lack of openness and transparency that characterized this war. How can we not be left with a bad taste in the mouth, that of deceit and manipulation?

The "truth in politics" web site ( http://www.thetip.org ) has many entries on Iraqi and Bush.