! > Wasn't it to find WMDs before Saddam could use them against the US? ! ! The spectre of WMD was raised in the immediate ! aftermath of 9/11. ! There was never a reference to this threat without some other tie-in
! to 9/11. The rationale for the Iraq invasion depended 100% on the ! fear that was in the American people at that time that another ! terrorist attack could happen at any time. Now who better to ! personify this threat than that terrible bogeyman Saddam? Given the ! general ignorance of Americans about anything outside our ! borders, What a crock of sh*t. Talk about stereotyping and generalizing. ! it ! was simple to paint Osama == Arab == Saddam, and transfer the fear ! and anger toward Osama and al Qaeda to Saddam and Iraq. The argument was and remains that pre-9/11, containment of Saddam seemed like a good idea. Post 9/11, the rationale behind it was found lacking, because of his history of terrorist ties and seeking of WMD capabilities---not to mention the proclivity to use them when he had them. And the strong suspicions --held by many world governments and their intelligence agencies--that he had them already and was actively trying to develop them. While nobody knew for sure, we strongly believed it, and weren't willing to wait till they became an immanent threat. Not to mention that strategically speaking Iraq was geopolitically significant in this broader struggle against Islamofascism. All Saddam ever had to do was let inspections run their course to prove he didn't have them. No, instead he played cat and mouse, and did everything he could to look like he had something to hide. And we may never know for sure what was in those caravans crossing into Syria that our satellites picked up on about the time we were going the extra mile with the UN and giving debate in Congress a chance to run its course. It was known then that Zarqawi was in Iraq---Bush mentioned that too in his speeches---as well that Iraq and Al Qaeda were at least feeling each other out, if not collaborating "in general". (I keep pointing to the 1998 indictment of Bin Laden which specifically identified this fact, and ABC news reports at the time about it.) Nobody ever said that he was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks though there were suspicions based on, among other things, prophetic editorials coming out of Baghdad's government run newspaper just a month or two before the attacks. In any case, the notion that the world would be a better place if he was still in charge in Iraq is absolutely assinine. That the strategy of getting Al Qaeda to invest resources in Iraq has worked is evidenced by how eager they seem to be defeating us there, and how impotent frankly they have been. At best they can muster a few IADs here and there, lob off a few innocent people's heads, and blow up some women and children in restaurants. To call this "insurgency" anything but a military dud is also ridiculous. Pschologically, the "loyal opposition" here in America gets a shot in the arm every time a bomb goes off or a helicopter goes down and kills some troops, or anytime anything bad happens for that matter, because they see electoral opportunity in such bad news; but militarily we've achieved pretty much all of our major objectives pretty handily -- including keeping our military casualties to a statistically unprecedented minimum. The opposition has made the WMD argument the sine qua non of the policy of toppling the regime, but that was only part of the argument. Personally I think it was oversold, but I think long term the argument always was that in place of dictators the ME needed democratic regimes if it was ever to enter modernity and overcome the forces of evil and oppression from within. This now is happening in Iraq, but because we tend to want instant gratification with our french fires, we're also getting politically antsy after a mere 3 years (which in geopolitical and historical terms is NOTHING) of effort. If you look back you will see that Saddam was given many outs that he could have taken, and we did everything we could short of throwing up our hands and saying "Well, if De Villepin is against it, how can we be for it?" to please the UN appeasers. These same folks were all for 1441, until they saw that unlike in the past, this time we were putting our military assets where our mouths were. Then they realized their personal gravy trains were threatened (we discovered how deeply embedded their hands were in Saddam's pockets in the oil-for-food scandal). Then all of a sudden they tried to stop us. Too late. Now Saddam is on trial, his sons are dead, Zarqawi is pushing up daisies, Al Qaeda is on the defensive, and Iraq has a new elected government of its choosing despite genuine political tensions that make even an upstate New Yorker's smarmy disdain for "Jesusland" pale in comparison---and you'd think it's the end of the world and everything is black and awful and terrible and going horribly awry. Obviously, though, since we have to pay an extra $1 or so per gallon for gas, and there are still some bad people in the world, here and abroad, the whole thing wasn't worth it. <sarcasm/> - Bob ! ! -- Ed Leafe ! -- http://leafe.com ! -- http://dabodev.com ! ! ! ! ! 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