Not another American soldier can die for Islam. Let them fight each other.
I say we stand off and nuke it from orbit, it’s the
only way to be sure...then declare Victory and come home.
I see; just forget about all those Kurds killed by poison gas. That’s heartwarmingly feeling.
Mr. Shaw certainly has a selective memory. May as well stop reading there. This sort of stuff has become tiresome by now. The war was "launched" by Saddam's brutal invasion of Kuwait ten years earlier. It was not settled, it was in a stasis where U.S. planes were attempting to enforce a no-fly zone in order to prevent another atrocity such as the one at Halabja and were being shot at for their trouble. Saddam was openly disobeying the terms of the cease-fire and defying UN arms inspections. Saddam was supporting existing terror organizations within Iraq at such sites as Salman Pak. Bush was faced with a decision to remove Saddam or risk Saddam supporting organizations such as the one that had just taken down the World Trade Center. Whether his intelligence estimates were correct about the current status of WMDs or not is irrelevant - if they were inaccurate it was because Saddam did his best to make them that way. There was nothing "unjust" about the invasion.
But what’s preemptive about attacking an enemy who has no intention of attacking you?
Either the author is a mind-reader or he doesn't consider open support of terrorist organizations whose intention was most certainly to attack us to be "intention". Spare me the sanctimony, please - Saddam was a monster and removing him was a moral action. Nation-building afterward was, as well, even if it appears at this point to have been a futile effort. If we hadn't tried it, we'd still be wondering if it would have bought us the ten years it did.
There were no perfect courses of action, not even complete inaction. There was only bad and worse. The author now has the luxury of criticizing the bad. He's welcome to it.