Free Republic

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." President Clinton , Feb. 4, 1998. "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." President Clinton , Feb. 17, 1998. "Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear,...

GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said Thursday that the Middle East was more secure when key dictators were still in power, and said too many Democrats and Republicans have supported toppling Middle Eastern governments to the benefit of the United States' enemies."Was the world, in fact, in the Middle East, a more secure place when Saddam Hussein was in power, when Moammar Gadhafi was in power, and when [Bashar] Assad wasn't fighting for his life in Syria?" asked MSNBC's Joe Scarborough."Of course it was," Cruz answered. "That's not even a close call."Cruz said Gadhafi did bad things but had worked...

BAGHDAD: Top Iraqi officials attended a funeral Wednesday for politician Ahmed Chalabi, a controversial champion of the U.S.-led invasion of his country. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, President Fuad Masum, parliament speaker Salim al-Juburi and other officials were among the large crowd of mourners at the ceremony held in Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone, where the government is headquartered. Chalabi, the head of parliament's finance committee, died of a heart attack aged 71 the day before. Living in exile as head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which opposed Saddam Hussein, Chalabi became a White House favorite for information he provided which...

Iran considered pursuing a nuclear deterrent when it began its nuclear program in the 1980s, during an eight-year war with Iraq, a former president has been quoted as saying. Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s comments comes at a sensitive moment, as Iran implements an agreement reached with world powers in July aimed at curbing its nuclear program, to allay Western fears it was trying to build an atomic bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations nuclear watchdog, is investigating whether Iran’s nuclear program ever had a military application. It is due to issue a report by Dec. 15....

Washington (AFP) - The world would be a better place if dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Moamer Kadhafi were still in power, top Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump said in comments aired Sunday. The billionaire real estate tycoon also told CNN's "State of the Union" talk show that the Middle East "blew up" around US President Barack Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, his biggest Democratic rival in the race for the White House.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, when asked if he believes the Middle East would be better today if Moammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq were still in power, responded, "It's not even a contest." He related the situations in both of those countries with what is currently happening in Syria and seemed to endorse a stronger President Bashar Assad, even while admitting that he is "probably a bad guy." "You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there — it's a mess — if you look at Saddam Hussein with...

While attending the Iraqi army’s artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words “God is great.” “It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this,” Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani. […] Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS....

“What We Know Now”: Iraq revisionism is not knowledge by Daniel Clark “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” That was the question that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly put to Jeb Bush about Iraq. The Florida governor’s answer, and his subsequent attempts at clarification, have since been roundly criticized. Little has been said, however, about the awfulness of Kelly’s question. Bush should have challenged Kelly’s premise, by asking her what it is “we know now” that should produce a different answer than he would have given in 2003. When critics of the Iraq War refer...

The detail hindsight forgets, and the fiction murky memories create We’ve been coming back to the Iraq War lately for two reasons. One is that the media keep bringing it up in the form of a knowing-what-we-know-now gotcha question aimed at Republican presidential candidates (although they offer no such question to Hillary Clinton concerning the 2011 withdrawl of all U.S. troops . . . not that she would answer). The other, more pertinent reason, is that ISIS is overrunning Iraq at the moment, taking advantage of the absence of a residual U.S. force and Barack Obama’s refusal to wage a...

<p>Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.</p> <p>Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.</p>

RUSH: It's Josh in Williamsburg, Virginia. Great to have you, sir. Hello. Appreciate your patience. CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for taking my call. So I want to do two things. The first is to say that Jeb Bush's answer to Megyn Kelly's initial question was not necessarily wrong. He could validly have that answer to her question. The second is to -- RUSH: Wait a minute, Josh. What -- CALLER: Yeah. RUSH: Just refresh people's -- what did he say? What was his answer to that first question? He would do it all over again, right? CALLER: Yeah. So the...

When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening...

A fugitive Iraqi militant leader and the former right-hand man of Saddam Hussein has reportedly been killed in a skirmish. Iraqi officials said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri had died in fighting with government troops in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad. Al-Douri, 72, headed the Naqshbandi Order insurgent group, an important faction behind the recent rise of ISIS. He was one of Saddam's most trusted henchmen, helping to lead his 1968 bloodless coup. Both Al-Douri and Saddam came from the same Tikriti tribal background. He was then deputy to Saddam when he was deposed following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following...

SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe. Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through...

On a recent Saturday evening, Ahmed al-Shabibi relaxed at a hookah café in England with other Iraqi friends – both Shiite and Sunni Muslims – when the conversation turned to the ongoing battle to reclaim the city of Tikrit from Islamic State jihadists. A Sunni in the group lamented Iranian interference in the fight and boasted that such meddling never would’ve occurred under the former Sunni dictator, Saddam Hussein. Al-Shabibi said he and the others agreed because, “Saddam, as you know, had a very interesting idea of security.” Nostalgia for Saddam is hardly new, but it appears to be reaching...

The NY Daily News blasted the GOP on its cover today, calling them "traitors":   Regardless of President Obama’s fecklessness in negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, 47 Republican U.S. senators engaged in treachery by sending a letter to the mullahs aimed at cutting the legs out from under America’s commander-in-chief. We join GOP signatories in opposing the pact as outlined, but we strenuously condemn their betrayal of the U.S. constitutional system. The participants represented the bulk of the Republicans’ 54-member senatorial majority, vesting their petulant, condescending stunt with the coloration of an institutional foreign policy statement. They are an...

Violent attacks by Boko Haram have caused many to flee their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis within Nigeria and neighboring countries. Refugees say they have witnessed brutal acts of savagery, with men's throats being slit and women being held as "war booty." Chad has become the latest country on the border with Nigeria to be affected by a Boko Haram attack. The BBC's Tom Oladipo went to Yola village in Aadamawa state in northeast Nigeria and spoke to refugees there. ...

The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting. In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened. "From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam...

Gone With The WMD: Recalling the fleeting facts about Iraq by Daniel Clark The Ocober 14th New York Times story revealing a stockpile of 5,000 chemical weapons in Iraq was not news. That’s why baffled conservatives like National Review’s Deroy Murdock are mistaken when they wonder why George W. Bush would “cover up” this information. The bulk of these pre-1991 weapons were stored at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facility in al-Muthanna, and had actually been declared to the United Nations at the end of that conflict. The existence of al-Muthanna’s chemical weapons stockpile had been revealed in the Duelfer Report...

The founder and former CEO of the Blackwater Worldwide security firm said Thursday that the conviction of four of his former employees for their roles in the 2007 fatal shooting of 14 unarmed Iraqis was unexpected, and raised questions whether they received a fair trial. “Well, there was certainly a lot of politics surrounding this and the fact that the federal government spent tens of millions of dollars on this, now trying it seven years after the event, and 7,000 miles from where it happened,” said Erik Prince, in a phone interview. “Certainly, it adds a lot of politics to...