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re: another interesting factoid
TB — (archived)

M.A.E. is right that most of this has been hashed out before.

While regime change and political freedom were mentioned often prior to the war, it was indeed mostly about WMDs, and about dealing with a dictator that had a proven record of:

--Dealing with and supporting terrorists, particularly Palestinian ones, and operating terrorist squads within his own organizations. The latter were responsible for an attempted attack on the first George Bush. The "no connection with al Qaeda" bit was obviously a red herring to start with, and I got tired of dealing with it a long time ago.

--Attempting the invasion of two different bordering countries, thwarted in one case by the country itself (the war with Iran), and in the other case by the U.S. and its allies (the first Gulf War).

As an aside, I'm going to assume as a matter of course that few people here will remember the shrieks of outrage from the Left at the time of the first Gulf War, since it doesn't fit comfortably into the current anti-war scenarios. Only the short duration of that conflict--largely because we left Saddam in place to later kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis--kept it from becoming the same political quagmire the current war is. The 1991 Gulf War Resolution passed the House 250 to 183, (164 Republicans and 86 Democrats voted yes, 3 Republicans and 179 Democrats voted no) and the Senate by 52 to 47 (42 Republicans and 10 Democrats voted yes, 2 Republicans and 45 Democrats voted against). The myth of overwhelming Democratic and liberal support for that war is just that. A myth. We could go into which members of the current Democratic leadership landed on which side back then, and their motivations, but that's another thread.

--Building and deploying chemical weapons. These were actively used in warfare and population suppression against both Iranians and Iraqis.

--Constructing two consecutive nuclear weapons programs, the first of which was destroyed by the Israelis, to the universal condemnation of anti-Israelis and leftists around the world. The second program was secret, and went completely undetected by the U.N. and others until the Gulf War exposed it. Those who claim no nuclear program could be hidden from the U.N. conveniently forget this uncomfortable fact.

At this point, 9/11 demonstrated, not an attack by Iraq, but that there were terror organizations willing to mount full-scale assaults on the U.S., and that they were limited in destructive capacity only by the weapons that they could acquire. The bar had just moved on what was dangerous in the world.

Under these circumstances, and based on past actions, only a nincompoop would have declared Iraq to be harmless based solely on the pronouncements of the United Nations and Saddam himself, and in the face of intelligence analyses from several separate national intelligence organizations. You might have made a case that, for the same reasons, other nations should have been targeted instead, or as well, but Iraq was the linchpin.

Until Bush was elected, most Democratic leaders agreed that Iraq was a threat, but not sufficient for full-bore invasion. Research "Desert Fox" and all the pronouncements made by Democrats and Clinton back then. Sure as hell THEY thought Iraq had WMD.

As far as discussion of how we got here, and where we go now, is concerned, nobody here is willing to talk about--at least in real-world terms--what would have happened if we had left Saddam alone and poured 150,000 troops into Afghanistan. Or for that matter, pulled another "Desert Fox" and left both countries with a load of craters and intact governments.

I've gotten tired of dealing in reasoned speculation with brains seemingly unequipped for abstraction and deduction, and unable to hold enough facts and alternatives in place in their minds to draw the obvious lines between them.

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