For years, America had believed that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of powerful weapons. But we put up with Saddam, even worked with him, correctly deeming that the risks of invading Iraq were much greater than the risk that Saddam would use those supposed weapons against us. As we know, Bush was thinking about attacking Iraq from the moment he took office, but 9/11 produced a kind of religious conversion in him and his administration. As Ron Suskind showed in his devastating portrait of the Bush administration, "The One Percent Doctrine," 9/11 led Dick Cheney to embrace the radical idea that if there was even a 1 percent chance that an Islamist enemy could get its hands on weapons of mass destruction, we had to attack. And it didn't matter who we attacked, or what the rationale was. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," Cheney said. "It's about our response."
God, Aristotle's unmoved mover, couldn't have said it better himself. After 9/11, the Bush administration embraced a quasi- theological mindset. America was not only always right but also impervious to harm -- because in the Christian-patriotic world that Bush inhabits, those who are right cannot fail.
This messianic conviction still drives Bush today -- which is why his presidency, in which all doubts are banished and reality itself is shut out, is beginning more and more to resemble that of a religious fanatic. But it also sheds light on a strange and disturbing parallel between Bush's invasion of Iraq, justified as a preventive attack to prevent more 9/11s, and the Virginia Tech killings.
In the media's voluminous coverage of the murders, one dark question appears to have remained unasked: Are there ever circumstances under which it is justifiable to preemptively murder someone? If there was ever a murderer whose troubled soul was laid bare for all to see long before he snapped, it was Seung-Hui Cho. And it is hard not to fantasize about some scenario in which some Cassandra-like psychiatrist, or teacher, or family member, or classmate, killed him before he killed someone else.
In the Old West, and in outlaw societies, such preventive murders were and are not unheard of. But nations governed by law reject the idea, for an obvious reason: It is impossible to be certain that you're right. And when you're setting out to kill someone who hasn't done anything yet, being wrong is not an option.
But as we have seen, for Bush, 9/11 removed the constraints of law and logic. He was now acting in the name of God and the flag, and those truths were bigger than logic -- Cheney's "analysis" and "evidence" -- or law. He didn't need the law to take out Saddam. He had a mandate to do so. In Bush's eyes, then and now, invading Iraq was like killing Cho before he started his killing spree.
If Bush had been right that Saddam was planning to attack America -- although there is actually no way we would ever have known that he was -- invading Iraq might have been justifiable homicide. But he was wrong.
And so we are not the heroes in this story -- we are the murderers. Bush's war has created a Virginia Tech nightmare that never stops. To the Iraqis who have seen their houses destroyed, their children blown apart, and their country destroyed, the day America came was the day a whole army of Seung-Hui Chos walked through the door.
Of course I am not literally equating America, or Bush, with the deeply disturbed young man who killed 32 people. The Bush administration did not set out to intentionally cause the death of 650,000 Iraqis. In their eyes, their intentions were good. But those intentions are meaningless. Because even arrogant fools can have good intentions.
For the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, all that matters is that before we invaded, even if their lives were oppressed, impoverished and controlled by a brutal dictator, they could still live. Now they can't. Their friends, their families, their entire country, are dying before their eyes. To be sure, the butchery is being done by Iraqis themselves and a few foreigners, not -- with some horrible exceptions -- by Americans. But America is responsible because America started the war that opened the gates of hell. When you start a war, you have no idea where it will end. You have to be sure it's worth the risk.
America is responsible for the Iraq nightmare. But this truth must be repressed. It does not fit our official narrative. No state wants to be told that it is the national equivalent of Seung-Hui Cho. And so the Bush administration, which now has the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on its hands as well as that of more than 3,300 Americans, clings to its Big Lie, insisting that the dreadful ongoing slaughter in Iraq proves that we were right to invade in the first place.
This is a profound perversion of logic and morality. Fortunately, fewer and fewer Americans believe it. But the mere fact that it is our official governmental narrative about a great human-rights catastrophe, one we set in motion, brings shame upon our country.
Bush does not represent the American spirit, thank God. But his leadership has shrunk our national soul. Bush is a devout Christian, but there is no charity, no spiritual generosity, in his vision. Our flag, under which he struts, once stood for an America bigger than itself. Bush's flag stands for an America that arrogates all the humanity and virtue in the world. It is a profoundly unreligious flag.
Which brings us back to individuals killed on Sept. 11, and in Virginia, and on the road from Mosul. What we owe them is what we owe every human being who was passed: the best of ourselves. We owe them remembrance, and respect, and clear thinking, and a resolution to make the world a better place. We owe them, in a word, our humanity.
The tragedy of America's response to 9/11 is that it did not reflect the best of America. The moral obscenity of the Iraq war is not only that it betrayed the Iraqi people, who never harmed us. It is that it betrayed the very people in whose name it was launched. It betrayed us all.
There is a way back to the humanity we have lost. We can find it in our compassionate response to the Virginia Tech tragedy, our prayers that solace will somehow come to those who have lost everything. We can find it by paying attention to an entire nation that is suffering because of a war we needlessly started. We can find it by accepting that we now owe the Iraqis everything, and that our hearts and pocketbooks must be theirs for our lifetime.
And we can find it by resolving to never again listen to leaders who believe that American blood is worth more than that of others, and who in the name of God and right lead us into righteous wars. Because there may be necessary wars, but there are no righteous ones. Because Donne was right, and every man's death diminishes us all. Because the Bible is right, and we must not kill. And those who would do good by waging war often end up becoming the very thing they feared: killers.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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