Standing alongside Lincoln Way on Sunday with friends as part of the Time For Peace vigil, I felt at ease. I felt united with the students and other residents of Ames around me as people drove by “honking for peace.” There were no arguments. Simply, a great number of people collected on the side of one of the busiest streets in Ames asking for others to reflect on this past year.

My calmness was disrupted by a passerby who yelled, “Go home!” from the concealing comfort of his pickup. Omar Tesdell, one of the coordinators of the event and fellow Daily columnist, turned to me chuckling and said, “I am home.” Unfortunately, the “love it or leave it” mentality has not completely escaped the confines of ignorant political dialogue.

It’s been one year since President Bush announced the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. One year, 679 coalition deaths, 3,254 coalition injuries, at least 5,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, and billions upon billions of dollars later, we are still far from completing our president’s mission.

I have found it moderately difficult to proceed with an outright verbal attack on the Bush administration and like-minded people. After seeing pictures and hearing stories from the mouths of our wounded soldiers, I want to be able to reassure them their sacrifice was made for a just cause. Liberating millions of people from a brutal authoritarian government is certainly a just cause.

Despite this, it is very important to remember what brought our troops to the sands of Iraq in the first place: weapons of mass destruction. This issue has been clouded by the White House. What started out as possession of weapons of mass destruction quickly turned into programs to make them — and has now fizzled to nothing. In fact, if we wanted to find a place where such weapons did exist, we would have had to look no further than the tiny town of Noonday, Texas, where government officials found a white supremacist who was capable of producing sodium cyanide gas explosive devices — these are chemical weapons.

We’ve come up empty-handed in Iraq despite the categorical guarantee given to us by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He spoke with confidence bordering on arrogance about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and dismissed naysayers as ignorant. How is he to have any credibility now when precautions weren’t taken to prevent a baseless war?

On CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,” Hans Blix, the top U. N. weapons expert, said the Bush administration assumed that “anything that was unaccounted for existed, whether it was sarin or mustard gas or anthrax.” He went on to say he thought “they lost their patience much too early.”

I concur.

Although, in a way, it is true that Rumsfeld didn’t rush into anything. Technically, he had been pushing for a regime change in Iraq since the Clinton years — and he wasn’t alone.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney were among others in the current Bush administration who urged the former president to take out Saddam. Wolfowitz has even admitted planning the war in Iraq took place as early as two days after Sept 11.

A former counterterrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, has also made accusations that President Bush was far more concerned with Iraq than with al-Qaida in the aftermath of Sept 11.

Clarke claims that, when he could not find any connection between Saddam and the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush urged him in an “intimidating manner” to find a link.

Whether or not you believe people like Richard Clarke, it seems there must be at least some truth to what he is saying. With the history of contempt for the former Iraqi regime shown by many members of the Bush administration, it’s not hard to believe some fraudulent connections were made out of convenience.

It’s very easy to say, “Hey, we got bad intelligence.” The Bush administration has almost successfully passed the buck while accomplishing their goals. However, the problem here was not simply one of bad intelligence — Bush had his hand poised to draw and fire.

In the following months, the Iraqi people will begin to govern themselves. I only hope we succeed in providing them with a democracy that works.

While this will be a great accomplishment, it is important to remember what has happened on the road to Iraqi freedom. Perhaps the Bush administration will be held to a higher standard the next time they choose to throw caution to the wind.