In what should not be much of a surprise, a recent report released by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (their web site is being overwhelmed at the moment) concludes that Iraq was not an imminent threat (something which should by now be crystal clear to anyone truly paying attention) and it was not necessary to invade; that it’s weapons of mass destruction was never a danger to us, that intelligence was misrepresented to the Congress and the American people, there was not a terrorist connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, and that studies should be carried out and information assessed so that American policy–particularly the preemptive strike policy–may be reconsidered and changed.

That is a very compact summary of the 111-page report (link to PDF file), but it hits the high points. While the Carnegie organization is described as a left-leaning think-tank and fingers of bias will be pointed, the points made in the report are nonetheless all too accurate, painting a picture of a war we never should have gone to, reiterating the well-establish fact that we were lied to in a rush to a war that had various ulterior motives.

Colin Powell has replied to the report, saying that “the game is still unfolding,” but it is becoming harder and harder for the administration to keep up the fiction that the massive stockpiles of WMD and an extensive Iraqi national program to produce these weapons could have existed when eight full months of painfully extensive searching has not turned up the slightest scrap of evidence that anything of the sort ever existed. The claims that weapons which threatened the doom of the free world are now cleverly hidden in some unknown garage somewhere are wearing thin.

It’s about time we give up the pretense and begin to accept that this was a war the administration wanted, not to protect us from WMD, not to free the Iraqi people, nor in response to any immediate danger or threat–but that, at best, the administration felt that Iraq was a possible future threat they wanted to eliminate and so used 9/11 and the current climate of fear to make the American people approve of a war they never would have approved of at face value–and at worst, that a variety of base motives, such as having control over oil production so as to control the markets, were the foundation of a massive campaign of lies and distortion.

And as all of this is being discussed, more and more of our people are being killed in Iraq–nine in a helicopter just today, five in various attacks on January 2nd, and recently a soldier killed almost every day. This in addition to all the other costs that American citizens and the country as a whole have been made to pay. Bush and his people would argue it as “we can’t leave now,” and while that is true, it is beside the point. The criticism is not that we should bug out and leave Iraq to become even worse, the point is that going into Iraq in the first place was a horrible blunder, a con job on the American people, and a diversion of money and resources from true national security. Capturing Saddam has not changed any of that.