Quote Originally Posted by The_Lurker View Post
Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
This guy has been an open critic of the Bush Administration for more than 10 years. He's also a Democrat who has openly supported Democratic candidates during that time, so I would take what he says with a grain of salt.

This isn't some fellow Republican coming forward and revealing shocking material against Bush.

I have said before on radio that I do believe that Cheney and the others saw what they wanted to see regarding the WMD situation in Iraq. But I also said that Saddam Hussein was pursuing WMDs for more than 10 years before the Iraq War of 2003. He was playing a repeated cat-and-mouse game with the US and UN inspectors. It was basically, "I don't have WMDs, but you can't look" and then "Okay, I was pursuing WMDs and that's why I didn't want you looking, but we really don't anymore. But you still can't look" over and over and over again. This persisted from the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 all the way through 2003 when we invaded. So if we happened to invade at a time when the WMD program had really stopped, it was likely that Saddam would have started it again at some point anyway.

Not that I'm saying that everything with Iraq was handled correctly, because it wasn't. But Bush went into it honestly believing that he was doing the right thing, and it wasn't outrageous at all in 2003 to believe that Saddam was building WMDs, because he had spent the past 12 years pursuing them, and was attempting to dominate the region in the years before that.

I think GW Bush made some mistakes and trusted some of his advisers too much, but he wasn't a bad man.



I voted for the man twice, and the cold hard facts are that he invaded a country lead by a man that we help install in power. Hundred of thousands of people died. and all of it for nothing.

The man is a war criminal, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq made us more enemies and will cause us grief for decades to come.
If you feel this way, why did you vote for him twice?

There was already plenty of criticism of the Iraq War by the time the November 2004 election rolled around.

Regardless of what you think of Bush and the war, there is no denying that Saddam was unpredictable/unstable, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and attempting to dominate/conquer the region. The decade-plus leading up to the war proved that time and time again. Remember, the first Gulf War was because he invaded Kuwait just because he felt like it.

So you can argue that perhaps we should have just stayed out of it, or that the money/human toll wasn't worth what we could gain, but you can't really argue that Saddam was doing just fine and we attacked him for no reason.