Personally, I think the answer to the question “Why did Bush invade Iraq?” is pretty clear — the administration clearly thought that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons. Hell, Al Gore insisted in late 2002 that Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Both at that time and today I think the administration made a major mistake (one of many involving Iraq) in focusing on WMDs so much and was clearly too insular in critically examining intelligence, but clearly the administration thought that going into the 2004 election it would be able to gloat that it had stopped a terrorist-supporting dictator from potentially turning over WMDs to terrorists.
A popular alternative answer, generally from supporters of the war, suggestion that WMDs were a cover for a broader administration initiative to change the status quo in the Middle East. Certainly this was an important secondary goal — and one that some in the administration probably thought as primary — but the case that this was the main reason for going to war appears to this observer as trying to explain away the intelligence failure over WMDs (which, by the way, has been overblown by administration critics — the lesson of 9/11 was that it is better safe to act on sketchy intelligence than to be sorry later for not having acted decisively and watch a tragedy unfold on national television).
Democrat Sen. Fritz Hollings has a different answer that sounds like it came from some anti-American Middle Eastern newspaper — Bush went to war to appease the Jews.
In an op-ed and then in a speech on the Senate Floor, Hollings asserted that the main reason the Bush administration went to war with Iraq was to try to enhance Israel’s security and to “please American Jews.” And, of course, this wouldn’t be complete without Hollings giving a list of Jews — including columnist Charles Krauthammer and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz — both of whom have publicly supported the view that the United States needed to overthrow Hussein in order to establish democracy in Iraq and thereby hopefully spread it throughout the region.
As Jonah Goldberg noted in National Review, only one politician has gone on record as making the absurd claim that he supported the war against Iraq in order to promote the interests of Israel rather than the United States, and that politician is Hollings, who said in 2003,
The truth is, I thought, we were going in this time for our little friend Israel. Instead of them being blamed, we could finish up what Desert Storm had left undone; namely, getting rid of Saddam and getting rid of (his) nuclear (weapons) at the same time.
Of course Hollings wasn’t the first Democrat to suggest that the real reason for the war was to appease the Jews. Rep. Jim Moran told an anti-war forum in March 2003 that,
If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this. The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should.
As Goldberg notes, this idea is just plain nuts. Nationally, Jews are only about 4 percent of the electorate and are disproportionately located in states, such as New York, that are solidly Democratic. As Goldberg writes,
. . . the notion that Bush and Karl Rove are pinning their reelection hopes on winning 10 percent or 20 percent of the Jewish vote by getting America embroiled in a risky, dangerous, and costly war is batty.
But not batty enough for Moran or Hollings.
Source:
The S.C. Senator & the Jews. Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, May 27, 2004.