“The terrorists started this war on terror.”
News flash, Saddam had nothing to do with 911 and in fact was fighting those same terrorists and doing a darn good job of suppressing them. We attacked him on some trumped up charges of having “weapons of mass destruction” remember? In reality it was because Bush jr had his panties in a bunch about Saddam trying to put a hit on his dad.
So evidence has come out that it was the Saudi government (and Bush knew this at the time he attacked Iraq) that was behind the attacks, are we going to start a war with them? No? Gee what a surprise.
That may be so...but I would ask; Would you, as a sitting President, regardless of family ties, permit a country’s government to attempt an assassination on a US citizen, let alone, a former US President?
The WMD issue...hmm, I seem to recall a few thousand Kurds being wiped out by the Hussein regime using WMD. So they did exist and had been used. There was evidence at the time that the WMD had simply been sent to Syria, with Russian assistance.
How much WMD is too much? One shell, one drum, one truckload, one trainload? Remember, MASS Destruction...it doesn’t take much of the chemical in a single artillery shell to unleash mass casualties. So were we to look for thousands upon thousands of drums, or a few dozen?
I forget, how many UN resolutions did Saddam fail to comply with as a result of having his A$$ kicked in GW1?
Oil for food scandal?
The persistent violations of the agreed upon No Fly Zones?
There were many reasons for Saddam to have been overthrown. Should we have done it? I’m still cogitating on that, but in retrospect, we did ourselves no favors.
And I do agree with the author’s position that we turned Iraq into a meat grinder for the terrorists...instead of on US soil.
You are wrong when you claim that Bush started the terror war, the terrorists did.
“Saddam had nothing to do with 911”
Sadaam had nothing to do with ordering 911, and a great deal to do with it happening.
As for Iraq not having WMDS, your comments are not simply wrong, but dumbassery writ large (and I do not use such terms lightly). Iraq had them; iraq declared them (and was repeatedly found to have done so incompletely); we - and representatives from a multitude of other countries - inventoried them, sampled them, and destroyed a *portion* of them. The only question and realistic debate is over what happened to the portion that was not yet destroyed when Hussein kicked inspectors and destruction personnel out of the country.
As for it being just “Bush’s panties in a wad” over a hit being put out on his dad, that is another layer of dumbassery. It became the official policy of the U.S. to remove Hussein from power all the way back in 1998.
We were being hit every year in a major way by Al Queda, who included in their inspiration that despite Husseins clear violation of pretty much every part of his 1990 cease-fire agreement, that we lacked the will to deal with him...and likewise even if we did respond to Al Quedas attacks we wouldn’t have the will to see it through.
Reasonable people may differ on how to deal with the issues, especially with hindsight...but to deny the Iraq possession of WMDs, or your retroactive “panties in a wad” explanation are totally ignorant.