Four years ago, our country engaged in an attack against terrorism. We began in Afghanistan, attacking Al-Qaeda and its supporters. Things went well, and in a short time we had Al-Qaeda running for cover.

After that, however, our attention became diverted, and we turned our formidable armies against the country of Iraq. A year and a half later, I still wonder about the “why” and “what” of this engagement. Why did we invade Iraq, and what did it have to do with our national security?

In the beginning, this war was about the disarming of Iraq, who supposedly had Weapons of Mass Destruction. In a speech on Jan. 23, 2003, President George Bush stated: “The dictator of Iraq has got weapons of mass destruction. If Saddam Hussein will not disarm, the United States of America and friends of freedom will disarm Saddam Hussein.”

Nothing was there to disarm. The summary of the final report on Iraqi WMD that was released earlier this month states, “… Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991.” It made similar statements for nuclear and Biological weapons. It seems that the spectra of WMD were just that.

We were told a great deal of misinformation on the subject of WMD. On March, 17, 2003, Bush addressed the nation and said, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

However, in a press conference on Feb. 24, 2001, while on a visit to Egypt, Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted as saying: “He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

So which is it? The final report on WMD in Iraq suggests that the latter quote was the true one. The American people were misled, and many Americans have died as a result.

But perhaps the problem is that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were somehow linked. Contrary to the intentional misquotes of the 9/11 Commission Report in an earlier opinion article this year, the 9/11 Commission came to the conclusion that Iraq and Al-Qaeda had no positive relations, and resentment existed between them.

According to the report, Osama bin Laden supported separatist groups within Iraq. The report said, “Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army.” All of this information was known in the mid-’90s, well before 9/11.However, these facts didn’t stop our leadership from making claims of a connection. United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference on Sep. 26, 2002, that he had reports of “contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical and biological agent training. And when I say contacts, I mean between Iraq and Al-Qaeda …” The “contacts” he speaks of, however, had been disproven by 1998, as is exposed in the 9/11 Commission Report Iraq and Al-Qaeda were not allies. But the disinformation worked: many people “still” believe that there was a tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

So what does that mean for us now? The Iraq war seems to have been a tangent, a distraction from what our real goal should have been. The world is not safer with Saddam gone, and we have given justification (at least in their minds) to the next generation of terrorists.