Spinning the Iraq war

The War On Terror began in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. The first major engagement of this war was the invasion of Afghanistan a few months later. Afghanistan was governed by the Taliban, a hard-line fundamentalist Islamic government, and it harbored multiple Al-Qaeda training camps. It was the safe haven of their leader, Osama Bin-Laden, and we believed that the overthrow of this government, the destruction of the camps and the capture of Bin-Laden were imperative to winning the War On Terror. Our allies, and most of the rest of the world agreed. While one can argue about the ultimate success of that action, the reasons behind it were clear and it carried a sense of moral correctness. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a different matter altogether.
The argument for invading Iraq initially did not center upon the threat of Al-Qaeda, rather it involved the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). There was good reason to believe this as Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons during its long war with Iran and against the Kurds in the north of Iraq following it. Most of the world opposed invading Iraq, however, because they felt that UN inspections had not been given sufficient time to find them. The US and a few of its allies decided to press on without the backing of the UN, and Iraq was invaded in the spring of 2003.
Iraq was defeated relatively easily by our strike force of just over 100,000 troops, but the stated objective of finding and eliminating WMDs was a bit more elusive. After extensive searching, only a few left over pre-war chemical weapons were found, but nothing of the large stockpiles of chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons that were believed to exist were located. The principal justification for the invasion had been found to be untrue, so the White House had to re-spin the rationale for the war.
Re-spinning the war to be about fighting terrorists rather than finding WMDs turned out to be relatively easy to do. The strike force had been too small to completely secure Iraq’s borders. Worse still, with the surrender of the Iraq military many of its ammunition and weapon caches were left unguarded. This proved to be a volatile combination as Islamic fighters poured over the unprotected borders and along with local Iraqi insurgents, seized many of these unguarded weapons. The result? Iraq was awash in terrorist activities and the White House could now frame the conflict as part of the War on Terror.
The Iraq war continues, and over 4000 of our brave troops have given their lives. Over 150,000 Iraqis have also died, and our successes against the insurgents and terrorists are questionable at best. To make matters worse, no one seems to have a viable exit strategy. Is this really what we envisioned that the War On Terror.