Throughout the 2000 campaign, Bush promised on several occasions to pursue a “humble foreign policy” if elected president. He repeatedly said that he opposed nation building.

On the day before the 2000 election, Bush launched his final attack on Al Gore. Bush said, “I’m worried about an opponent who uses nation building and the military in the same sentence.” (Time, November 24, 2003)

After attacking Afghanistan in 2001, Bush went on to create a government that slightly resembled a democracy. After he declared victory in Iraq on May 1, 2003, he asked for $87 billion to rebuild the country.

Bush administration officials claimed Iraqis would be “dancing in the streets” once American forces marched into Baghdad. But the hundreds of thousands of delirious Iraqis never filled the streets.

Bush created the vacuum in Iraq that was quickly filled by terrorists. Before the war, the American intelligence community – to the dismay of the president – found no evidence whatsoever of a link between the Saddam Hussein regime and terrorist networks. Bush repeatedly said that Hussein needed to be removed before terrorism would subside.

After Bush declared victory, the Iraqi infrastructure remained in chaos. Living standards plummeted. Drinking water was a precious commodity. Open sewage spewed in streams in neighborhoods. The rate of crime escalated. Many Iraqis took the land into their own hands. Many Iraqis longed for the return to the old regime, where their lives were predictable under Hussein. The Bush administration appeared paralyzed and frustrated, unable to solve the political and diplomatic problems in Iraq.

Bush claimed that anti-American groups in Iran infiltrated into Iraq. One was a special unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The other were members of the Badr Brigade, the armed force of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shi’ite group, with headquarters in Tehran. (New York Times, April 23, 2003)

On April 8, Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, an Iranian cleric born in Iraq, issued a “fatwa” (religious edict) that called on Shi’ites “to seize the first possible opportunity to fill the power vacuum in the administration of Iraqi cities.” The order urged the Shi’ite clergy to work against American influence. The fatwa read in part: “People have to be taught not to collapse morally before the means used by the Great Satan if it stays in Iraq” (New York Times, April 26, 2003)

The Iraqi police force turned out to be corrupt. The Pentagon did not count on criminal gangs’ systematically tearing a part Iraq’s crumbling infrastructure and smuggling it out to sell abroad. (Newsweek, October 6, 2003).

The Bush administration boasted of Iraqis pulling down a statue of Saddam Hussein near the Palestine Hotel. But as cameras pulled back, only a handful of Kurds, recruited by INC leader Ahmed Chalabi, participated, while hundreds of others appeared uninterested.

On May 1, the White House spent $1 million to outfit Bush in war gear and fly him a short distance to the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of San Diego. The carrier was positioned so cameras would not see the nearby coast line as Bush spoke behind a huge banner that read “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.”

“Bring them on,” Bush bragged as he dared militants to attack United States troops in Iraq. (CNN.com, July 4, 2003)

In October, General Ricardo Sanchez, the United States military commander for Iraq, acknowledged that American troops had failed to secure acres of munitions from the Hussein regime. Many of the weapons could have been seized and used by anti-American groups. Sanchez conceded that it would be years before the Bush administration could “draw down” American forces in Iraq. He warned of more battles where “significant engagement where tens of American soldiers” would be killed. (Chicago Tribune, October 3, 2003; Newsweek, November 3, 2003)

On September 11, 2003 -- the second anniversary of 9/11 – Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz charged that high-ranking Al Qaeda lieutenants were plotting with former Saddam Hussein officials to kill Americans in Iraq. Wolfowitz said “a great many” operatives of Al Qaeda were working to link up with Iraqis loyal to Saddam’s regime to attack Americans. (New York Times, September 13, 2003).

One day later, Wolfowitz said he had misspoken and that he had referred to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the few people that Bush administration officials had cited previously to assert links between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the war. (New York Times, September 13, 2003

ESCALATING VIOLENCE

Violence continued to intensify with each passing month. Bush was dealt huge blows in the summer and fall of 2003.

1. A sophisticated car bomb exploded at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 17 people and injuring three times that number.

2. A suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives at the United Nations compound, killing over 30 people. In October, a United Nations seven-member panel, investigating the attack against its Baghdad compound, charged that its system for ensuring protection had fundamentally “failed in (its) mission to provide adequate security.” (Washington Post, October 22, 2003)

3. A massive car bomb exploded at the Imam Ali mosque during Friday prayers in a holy city just south of Baghdad, killing Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most important Shi’ite clerics. Over 20 people died as a result of the bombing. Al-Hakim had just delivered a sermon calling for Iraqi unity at the shrine, the holiest in Iraq. (New York Times, August 29, 2003)

4. American soldiers mistakenly killed eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian hospital worker in a gun battle in Falluja. (New York Times, September 12, 2003)