Major Alert : We found the Terrorists who took the weapons

[khirkhib]

At this point I don't think that the US is better off that we invaded Iraq.  All things considered.

And with 100000 dead in Iraq I don't think they are better off either.  Most of Saddam's most brutal killings occured in the mid 1980s when Rumsfeld was selling him chemical weapons to use against Iran.

There were the mass killings right after the gulf war when Bush I said the US said that they would support a shiite uprising and then decided not to.  Saddam killed his insurgents.

Alawi has killed prisoners, point blank in prison and thats only what we have heard of.  Give him time.  He could become worse than Saddam.  Most tyrants were US allies when they started.

[khirkhib]

"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough - didn’t they search carefully enough?” Giuliani

[khirkhib]

John Kerry is blaming the President because the President did not send enough troops and the intelligence community did not give the information on all the important weapons sites to the military.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

And on Rumsfeld.:

As the fabulous Ford years drew to a close, Donny R. chose to return to the private sector, focusing on super-lucrative jobs in pharmaceuticals and technology. Although he had no previous business experience, Rumsfeld beefed up his resume with implied political influence by simultaneously serving in a variety of government posts. He served in nearly a dozen special postings of one sort or another from 1982 to 2000.

Perhaps the most memorable of these roles came during the Reagan administration, when Rumsfeld was named special presidential envoy to the Middle East. According to the Washington Post and others, Rumsfeld was a major proponent of the Reagan administration's support of Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein.

As a conciliatory gesture, the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, paving the way for Rumsfeld to visit Baghdad in 1983, about the midpoint of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war.

At the time, intelligence reports indicated the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran "almost daily." During several trips to Iraq, Rumsfeld told government officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major strategic defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, Rumsfeld told the Butcher of Baghdad that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq.

In 2002, Rumsfeld tried to put a gloss on this meeting by claiming that he warned Hussein against using banned weapons, but that claim was unsupported by the State Department's notes on the meeting.

 As a result of the openings created by Rumsfeld's diplomatic triumphs, U.S. companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush Sr.. Care packages to Saddam included sample strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin.