Dr. Michael Saba, Arab News

WASHINGTON, 15 May 2004 — With all of the bad news regarding the Middle East coming out of the US these days, it is refreshing to find some positive actions coming from unlikely sources. A college senior, Devon Largio, from the University of Illinois has gained national and international praise and recognition for her senior honor thesis titled, “Uncovering the Rationales for the War on Iraq: The Words of the Bush Administration, Congress and the Media from Sept. 12, 2001, to Oct. 11, 2002.” And her thesis and the model she developed for analysis might have a lot more relevance to predicting the future than Largio realizes.

Largio has uncovered many different rationales — 27 -, in fact, all developed between Sept. 12, 2001 and Oct. 11, 2002 for going to war with Iraq. All but four of these rationales originated with the administration of George W. Bush.

The study also points out that the Bush administration switched its focus from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein early on — only five months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

This study which appears to be the first of its kind done in a scientific manner is particularly remarkable when one realizes that its author is a college student. Her professor at the University of Illinois, Scott Althaus, stated, “It is first-rate research, the best senior thesis I have ever seen — thoroughly documented and elaborately detailed. Her methodology is first-rate.” Largio mapped the road to war over three phases: Sept. 12, 2001 to December 2001; January 2002, from Bush’s State of the Union address, to April 2002; and Sept. 12, 2002 to Oct. 11, 2002, the period from Bush’s address to the United Nations and Congress’s approval of the resolution to use force in Iraq.

She drew from statements by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Policy Board member and long-time adviser Richard Perle; by US senators Tom Daschle, Joe Lieberman, Trent Lott and John McCain; and from stories in the Congressional Record, the New York Times and The Associated Press. She logged 1,500 statements and stories. With regard to the administration’s shift from Bin Laden to Saddam, Largio found that Iraq was “part of the plan for the war on terror early in the game.”

For example, in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 29, 2002, President Bush declared that Iraq was part of the war against terrorism because it supported terrorists and continued to “flaunt its hostility toward America.” He also claimed that Iraq allowed weapons inspectors into the country and then threw them out, “fueling the belief that the nation did in fact plan to develop weapons of mass destruction,” Largio wrote. In the same speech, the president called Iraq, Iran and South Korea an “Axis of Evil,” a phrase that would “ignite much criticism” and add “to the sense that the US would embark on a war with the Hussein state,” Largio wrote. “So, from February of 2002 on,” Largio said, “Iraq gets more hits than Osama Bin Laden. For President Bush the switch occurs there and the gap grows over time.”

Largio also discovered that it was the media that initiated discussions about Iraq, introducing ideas before the administration and congressional leaders did about the intentions of that country and its leader. The media also “brought the idea that Iraq may be connected to the 9-11 incident to the forefront, asking questions of the officials on the topic and printing articles about the possibility.”

The media “seemed to offer a lot of opinion and speculation, as there had been no formal indication that Iraq would be a target in the war on terror,” Largio wrote. Oddly, though, the media didn’t switch its focus to Iraq and Saddam until July of 2002.

Yet, “Overall, the media was in tune with the major arguments of the administration and Congress, but not with every detail that emerged from the official sources.”

“As always, hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Largio wrote in the conclusion to her thesis.

“However, there are questions surrounding nearly every major rationale for the war.

“People may wonder, why are our men and women over there? Why did we go to war? Were we misled?

In this election year, these questions deserve answers. And though this paper cannot answer these questions definitively, it can provide some insight into the thinking of the powers-that-be during the earliest stages of war preparation and give the American people a chance to answer these questions for themselves.”

In an interview with the Arab News, Largio stated that she did the study from a completely neutral scientific standpoint and was not trying to make any particular point with her thesis.

“I let the data speak for itself,” she said. “I had no political agenda in mind when I did the study.” Asked if she felt there might be any political backlash directed toward her and her study, which might be considered a negative to the Bush administration, she said, “I haven’t even thought about that, but you’re the second person that asked me that today.” That is part of the refreshing nature of a study like this being done by a sincere student with no political agenda in mind.

Finally when Largio was asked whether she thought that the model that she developed could be used to predict other wars and conflicts that the US might initiate, she said, “When I did the study, I didn’t have that in mind, but I have noticed other statements coming from the same sources that I analyzed in my study which could point to something coming. However, as I mentioned in my thesis, 20-20 hindsight is always easier than predicting the future.”

She noted that Syria, Iran, North Korea and even Saudi Arabia have been prominent in political discussions of late and said that she might try to apply her model to those countries in the future. Largio will graduate tomorrow, and will attend law school at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in August.

— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.