Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
I do believe they wanted a war with Iraq and used 9/11 as an excuse (even I never bought the Iraq/al Qaeda connection), but I still don't believe it was primarily about the oil.
Saddam started and stopped his WMD program so many times during the 1990s that the US had gotten sick of it. It was clear that he would "cooperate" occasionally just to keep his country from being invaded/attacked, and then would go back to developing WMDs and tried to stall any of the agreed-upon inspections. The whole process was a joke, and Saddam was making a mockery of it. If the US sat and did nothing (or just made weak threats), Iraq would likely have WMDs at this point. Saddam was like a child disobeying his parents, and the parents threatening to spank him, but never following through. The child learned that he wouldn't ever face consequences. That's why Saddam was so brazen during the months leading up to the invasion. He convinced himself that it wouldn't really happen, because the US had been posturing for over 10 years and had done nothing.
At the time of the Iraq invasion, my feelings were, "Good. Time to put an end to this nonsense. I don't think this has anything to do with 9/11, but I'm glad something is finally being done."
I wasn't outraged when the WMDs weren't found. It was clear that Saddam had a real WMD program at various points throughout the '90s, and still wanted them. Whether WMDs existed at the moment of invasion was irrelevant.
I was less thrilled with the nation-building aspect of the Iraq war. That's why GHW Bush bailed out the first time around. He didn't want to get involved with doing that. This was something that should have been better thought out, and unfortunately caused the majority of American casualties in that war.
I don't know how you can believe this, and view the war as anything besides a colossal failure on every front. First off, Saddam was a Muslim like Obama is a devout Christian. Neither are, but it's simply the rhetoric you have to espouse when you rule those perspective countries.
Even IF Saddam had developed any WMD outside nuclear weapons, which he never even got close to in the slightest, he still would not have posed any threat to us. I would argue even with nuclear weaponry he would have posed little risk, but the potential for that knowledge to seep out to actual fundamentalists would have been a concern. He was very clearly a leader hell bent on suppressing his own populace, and the Kurd uprisings, and possibly expanding his empire very locally, ala Kuwait. Staying in power was his only concern, and he knew full well that attempting any aggressive action toward the US would result in his total destruction and to an end like he eventually met.
He was never a true believer by any measure. We have so many threats in that region, and he was literally the least of them. What we left, a ruling party now comprised of actual true believers is far more dangerous than when he was in power even if he had a North Korean level of weaponery.
I recall right after the statue fell, the opinion polls in Iraq ran about 50/50 as to whether we had done the right thing. They were relieved he was gone, but the devil you know and all that to half the population. Had we immediately left, it would have simply been retarded as opposed to monumentally retarded. By the time we left, our popularity was 5%, and we were generally viewed as the devil, and we left that opinion, in conjunction with true believer rulers at the end of the day. That is the height of stupidity, and proves that every idea that Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney,and W had regarding how the war would progress was proven to be sub-moronic by any measure. It is the definition of a total fail at every level.
It would have been incredibly stupid to remove Saddam had it not cost a dollar, or a life. That it also cost a trillion dollars conservatively just adds to how bad a decision it was.
Eventually, the new Iraq will be far more dangerous than the old Iraq ever could have been. It may be 20 years from now, like the Taliban we created to combat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80's, but it will come back to haunt us.
The only true danger ever to us are true fundamentalists, period. Saddam was the furthest thing from that. Dudes who give up lives of luxury and hundred million dollar fortunes to live in caves like OBL are true fundamentalists and a danger. Guys who build a dozen palaces, bring a different woman to one each night, and are only concerned with keeping that enviable position are not true fundamentalists. It's why we assisted Saddam during the Iran/Iraq war years ago, because we knew he was the far lesser evil in regards to our national security. He only posed a threat to his own people, which are now a people that hate us anyway, and which we generally had to treat exactly like he did in order to control and stabilize.
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