A lot of the time it’s rather tiring to start writing about Iraq yet again. When I started the original version of this site in December of 2005, the Iraq Fiasco was already dragged on far longer than the nation had signed on for. A year before that the left was bemoaning the prospect of a second Bush term, having hoped that John Kerry would have been able to get us out of there.

As the Iraq occupation chugs along in its fourth year and the Afghanistan battle in its fifth, I keep seeing the same criticism thrown at not only myself but the American public at large. So the argument goes, the American people are impatient and it is the length of the war that has caused the civil unrest.

This assertion is false on its face. The American people may not be known for their patience, but that is not the reason we are showing a lack of such when it comes to this battle. We may be a country whose attention span has been drastically reduced by the likes of the internet and sound-byte based television shows, but the reason we want out of Iraq ASAP and are growing tired of a lack of effort to accomplish this is thanks to those who sold us the invasion in the first place.

Take a trip back to late 2002. At the time the nation was still rattled by the attacks of 9/11 and jumping at every shadow. The mere possibility of another nation who would want to attack us, had the ability to do so, and had any likelihood of following through was enough to put most of us on edge and clamor for a preemptive strike. Though generally not a country who supports preemption, being attacked once changed that view, at least temporarily.

The first of two causes of American impatience was brewed here. Preying upon our fears, we were told of the dire threats that the Hussein regime posed to us. They were linked to Al Qaeda, Bush said, having “high level contacts that go back a decade.” We were told of Mohammad Atta’s meeting with Iraqi officials in Prague. Conflations of Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were made so frequently that it seemed as though the inhale of “Iraq” was the natural followup to the exhale of “Al Qaeda”.

Then, of course, there was the weapons capability. Either anthrax or a nuclear threat, it didn’t matter. Both were thrown into the public eye ad nauseum. Colin Powell, for all his current apologetic attitude and newly grounded mindset, led the charge with his famous speech to the United Nations. Those watching saw a small vial of “anthrax” wielded, and computer simulations of mobile biological weapons labs (simulations, we found out, because there was no evidence of real ones). There were satellite photographs of what were purportedly weapons bunkers.

Holding the vial of anthrax was a conscious decision, just as was Bush’s description of the necessary amount of enriched uranium for a warhead: “a single softball.” This gave the weapons are more “real” feel, realer than they ever truly were. In Bush’s case, it was to make it seem as though it weren’t much at all. A softball isn’t particularly large, and so most of the world assumed it would be incredibly easy for Saddam to get a hold of it. Thus, we must act now.

Americans may have little patience for many things, but vanquishing an enemy is something we can all buck up and deal with. In an age where video games and movies back on World War II were incredibly popular, it wasn’t hard to drum up support to defeat a crazed mustached lunatic who conspired to conquer the world. He had already, so we were led to believe, been involved on a small scale attack on American soil. If he were to get a nuclear weapon, what would he do then?

That’s why the twofold link was so important. It would have been one thing to display that Saddam had nuclear weapons and would be able to use them, but it was only by implicitly (and occasionally explicitly) linking his regime to 9/11 that Bush and his cabal created the real fear that he would attack us if capable. We had seen the smoke in Manhattan, and the idea that the next would be a mushroom cloud was not something anyone cared to risk.

Of course, there were no links with Al Qaeda and there was no weapons program. The illustrations of mobile labs were fraudulent and the stationary ones no less so. As it turned out, Saddam was a threat to his people, but unable to even exert strength across his own borders. We were in less danger of an attack by Iraq than we were of an attack by space aliens a la Independence Day.

The President joked about it, making a small movie showing him looking for WMD around the White House. Many laughed, indirectly mocking the American soldiers who were risking their lives under the auspices that they were protecting us from those phantom nukes, mocking as well the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who had died while our military attempted to dismantle the nonexistent weapons program. Worse still, they had known this from the beginning.

The consequences of not invading Iraq were presented as a doomsday scenario that rivals any other. Any second guessing or hesitation would lead to our annihilation. From the various reports concerning Iraq’s threat to America, the most pessimistic and apocalyptic were adopted and relayed to the nation.

Conversely, only the most sunny and optimistic of post-war predictions were adopted. Far from a long and difficult war that would eliminate only a marginal threat, we were told of a nearly cost-free war. A two month campaign that would be so easy that most would hardly knew it happened, and that it would eliminate this dire threat. From Cheney’s repeated declarations that we would be greeted as liberators to Kanan Makiya’s prediction of “sweets and flowers,” it seemed as though the military would walk into Baghdad and the next morning Iraq would be free and happy.

When Donald Rumsfeld gave the prediction of the “conflict” lasting “six days, six weeks, I doubt six months,” that paired with the sunny optimism concerning post-war success had the nation believing that our men and women in uniform would be able to storm into Iraq after Easter and make it home by Thanksgiving. All we had to do was knock out Saddam and the Iraqi people would take it upon themselves to fix things up.

Then there was the money. From Paul Wolfowitz and others claiming that the war would pay for itself to the phenomenally low claim that only $1.7 billion would be spent on reconstruction, it seemed that not only would we be “at war” for hardly the full summer, but its cost would be a drop in the bucket compared to anything else. The war would happen without being felt by the public. Monumentally low predictions for necessary troop levels added to this.

Just like the assessment of Saddam’s threat to the United States, this was later proved horrendously wrong. We now sit, nearly five years after the war resolution was passed, looking at a permanent occupation of 130,000 troops in Iraq. Permanent occupation.

Have Americans lost patience? Not at all. It’s not the time that has worn down the public’s support for the war, it is what we have learned during that time. If WMDs had been found, and connections to Al Qaeda existed, it would be obvious that the invasion was necessary and even though the post-war had been terribly mismanaged, that would be offset by the assurance that the actions had saved us all from nuclear annihilation.

On the flip-side, had the post-war been as we were told and Iraq was currently a blossoming democracy, we may dislike the pretenses for the invasion but would be unable to deny its success and that the world at large is better off.

Instead, we watch as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died and millions have been displaced, thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent. We hear our leader talk about withdrawing a handful of troops as evidence of success immediately after having added two handfuls. We read that a permanent occupation is Bush’s endgame, not a swift and decisive victory after which our military can come home.

Many supported the war in order to save the oppressed Iraqis, but with body counts ranging from 80,000 to over a million it seems undeniable that far more have died under American occupation than Saddam’s rule. An Iraqi woman quoted in a Pittsburgh magazine noted that under Saddam they were not safe if they spoke against the regime. Now, they aren’t safe anywhere.

Many supported the war in order to defeat terrorism in general, but with Al Qaeda stronger than ever and enjoying a new foothold in Iraq that it had previously been denied thanks to the secular Saddam’s leadership, that is also an untenable claim.

Nothing, not one thing, that were told prior to the March 20th invasion has proven true. This is why support is lost, and it’s amazing any piece of the public supports the war at all at this point. We were sold poison in a medicine bottle and were told it would cure us of a disease we did not have.

So no, we have not lost patience. What we have lost is the war we had patience for, and in its place have been given a war we would have had no patience for from the beginning. It is the fault of the sellers of the war for the climate of unrest now, not an impatient American public who needs to grow up and stop whining.