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{335} Chapter nine Catholics and George W. Bush (2001–2004) In the wake of the nation’s closest presidential election, George Walker Bush promised to unite a bitterly divided country. And within nine months of taking office, he would: by sending U.S. troops into Afghanistan to hunt the Al Qaeda militants who had dared to attack the United States. But by the time he ran for reelection, the nation had again splintered, this time over the ill-fated U.S. occupation of Iraq. In between, Bush took significant strides to advance his faith-based initiative and to restrict abortion, only to fall short of his ultimate objectives in the Congress and the courts. Throughout his first term Bush listened so closely to Catholic leaders, and wooed so many Catholic voters, that some were calling him more “Catholic” than the Catholic opponent he would defeat in 2004. But by changing course earlier in Iraq and pressing harder for faith-based legislation and against abortion, he could have won over even more Catholic hearts and collected even more Catholic votes. War and Peace: Iraq “What if?” is the question that historians hate to ask but that leaders have to ask. For U.S. presidents from Harry S. Truman to George H. W. Bush, that query occupied the center of their anti-Soviet foreign policies. They expended countless hours, dollars, and lives preparing for the attack on American soil that never came. A decade after the end of the Cold War, however, the hypothetical became real. On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists killed almost three thousand people in their suicidal aerial destruction of part of the Pentagon and all of New York’s World Trade Center, as well as the crash of a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania. The first incursion across the borders of the United States since the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier introduced Americans to an even more perilous world than the one from which their Cold War commanders in chief had successfully defended them. {336} chapter nine It now fell upon George W. Bush, the former Texas governor with the threadbare Electoral College majority, to rally the nation behind its newest war, which offered no compass and portended no conclusion. Backed by a compliant Congress and an aroused public, Bush dispatched U.S. troops to fight Al Qaeda and its Taliban enablers in Afghanistan. Then, the real became hypothetical. Just in case another anti-American Muslim was hatching his own 9/11, the president announced in March 2003 that the United States would also be sending combat forces to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Once again, Congress complied and most Americans approved. Unlike when he went to war in Afghanistan, Bush defied the pope and the U.S. bishops by invading Iraq. Most Americans voted to prolong the Iraq war by reelecting the president, as did most American Catholics. But if the hierarchy did not speak for most of the Church or the country, they nonetheless contributed to American wartime diplomacy by raising their own age-old questions for a troubling new era. Prelude to Iraq On the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush addressed the nation on television. “We will not allow any terrorist or tyrant to threaten civilization with weapons of mass destruction,” said the president, without naming Saddam Hussein or Iraq. The next day he addressed the United Nations, urging action to disarm Iraq. On September 20 Bush announced his National Security Strategy, which argued that, in an era of chemical , biological, and nuclear weapons, and with the omnipresent threat of these weapons falling into the hands of rogue nations or terrorist networks, the United States must prepare for war even when a threat is not imminent. On September 26 Bush asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, according to the secretary’s notes, to “develop a plan to invade Iraq.” In November the Bush administration successfully pressed the un Security Council to adopt a unanimous resolution calling upon Iraq to disarm or face “serious consequences.”1 Many Catholics were wary of a second war. In a September 2002 letter to President Bush, which he hand-delivered to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (formerly the United States Catholic Conference), asserted that without “clear and adequate evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks of September 11 or an imminent attack...

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