Bush knew that Saddam didn't have WMD

[MODU]

ummm, ok.

[nlm]

ummm, ok.

Damn skippy. Unless you want to argue that sending our soldiers to die on wild guesses is a good thing, that enflaming an entire region of the world based on wild guesses is a good thing - then you bet it's OK.

[??????????]

Regardless of the moved WMD issue or not taking out Saddam was a step in the right direction towards putting a halt to Iran.

[nlm]

Regardless of the moved WMD issue or not taking out Saddam was a step in the right direction towards putting a halt to Iran.

I disagree.

Having an entity hostile to Iran (like Saddam) on their western boarder while we manipulated events in Afghanistan on their eastern boarder would seem to put Iran in a worse position and the United States in a better position than having our military over stressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq while Iran consolidates Shia interests inside of Iraq and watches us stumble around in Afghanistan without enough troops.

[Joe Biden 2020]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

[Boris]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Therefore, the best solution to that problem would be to obviously launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq fifteen years under false pretenses and without any thought to exit strategy or even the consequences. And then fuck up the post-war occupation in almost every way possible (that matters).

Truly the pinnacle of foreign policy thought, you are.

[nlm]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Therefore, the best solution to that problem would be to obviously launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq fifteen years (after the fact) under false pretenses and without any thought to exit strategy or even the consequences. And then fuck up the post-war occupation in almost every way possible (that matters).

Truly the pinnacle of foreign policy thought, you are.

I would have said it nicer (because I'm such a swell guy - or maybe not) - but yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head.

The idea that we are the worlds policemen has been fairly well debunked by the number of oppresive governments that we ignore. Anybody that thinks what Saddam did in Halabja in 1988 had anything to do with our recent screwball foreign policy moves just isn't thinking.

Here's an intersting piece on the Halabja slaughter and the many unknowns that surround it (which were treated as unknowns when Saddam was our friend, but the story morphed into a factual account - based on what Iran put forth, which nobody ever bothers to note anymore - when it was decided, by the decider, that Saddam had to go down).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1779.htm

[Silent Hunter]

You do realise, nlm, that earlier you were essentially proposing doing what the Reagan administration did vis Saddam's Iraq and now you're essentially condemning it.

Saddam did a lot of other things apart from Halabja, BTW.

Why do I get the feeling we're going round in circles?

[nlm]

You do realise, nlm, that earlier you were essentially proposing doing what the Reagan administration did vis Saddam's Iraq and now you're essentially condemning it.

Saddam did a lot of other things apart from Halabja, BTW.

Why do I get the feeling we're going round in circles?

Refresh my memory - how was I essentially proposing what Reagan did with Saddam and how am I now condemning it. You have had a difficult time not reading additional things into my words prior to this - it occurs to me that the same thing may be happening here.

[Silent Hunter]

Well, you're certainly suggesting the former:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Do you condemn the Saddam regime or not?

[nlm]

Well, you're certainly suggesting the former:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Do you condemn the Saddam regime or not?

Yes - I believe that a hostile entity on the eastern boarder of Iran is a good thing. Factually - Saddam provided that. Does that mean I support the more grotesque elements of the Saddam rule - no, that does not mean that. It means he served a purpose that aided the United States.

We are not the worlds police force. We are not responsible for all that occurs in this world. As our relationship with China and Saudi Arabia shows - we don't have to agree with their domestic agendas to be able to work with another nation. Thus, not liking another nations domestic agenda (or even condemning it) has little to do with our foreign policy - and even less to do with how we use our military.

[Silent Hunter]

I'd like to apologise for implying you were a hypocrite. Sorry.

[memphis]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Pretty standard authoritarian conditions. I certainly don't condone such actions, but it's hardly US policy to start wars over such things. Look at Darfur, for instance. Countless dead and we haven't done anything. Further, nearly all these atrocities took place in the Reagan years when Saddam Hussein was a US ally. It just doesn't make sense as a reason for war.

[minionofmidas]

According to this article, Tenet told the President that the Iraqi Foreign Minister said they didn't have WMD. He didn't believe the Foreign Minister. I wouldn't have believed the Foreign Minister.

Not a smoking gun.

This is yet another piece of evidence, added to numerous other pieces, that show that the existance of WMD's in meaningful quantities was very much a topic of debate.

It was not. The case was settled, closed and shut to all but the wilfully blind.

[minionofmidas]

This is the problem when you depend solely on intelligence provided by dissidents, since we did not have anyone in the country at the time providing intelligence directly to us. 

There were weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq which Bush pulled out prior to launching the invasion. The whole idea that "we didn't have the intelligence because we didn't have anybody in the country" is such BS.

I'm talking about imbedded intelligence, such as CIA, not weapons inspectors.  Remember, our inspectors were being shuffled around and denied access to many areas prior to the second phase of the war, so that alone provided belief behind the "he must be hiding them" claim which most of the Western nations governments believed.

Uh, no. The matter for Western governments was merely whether the hide of Saddam Hussein and the pursuit of truth and common decency were worth risking the alliance with America about. (And of course, the hides of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis - but that niggling doubt, of course, could be explained away by pointing out that their lives were hardly wonderful under the status quo and that the neocons' rosy scenarios about Iraq's future under the Americans, while highly dubious, could not be dismissed quite out of hand.) And then the issue got even more complex as eastern Europeans (and also a fewmiddling-sized western European governments. *cough* Spain *cough* Netherlands) felt they had a choice between Western European hegemony or American one... and they chose the further-away and thence less potentially dangerous side, especially since its rhetoric was also much more agressive. By that point, whether or no a country joined the "coalition of the willing" had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq anymore.
One of world diplomacy's ugliest messes ever, the whole affair. Of course, it was recklessly engendered by a certain White House administration, which doesn't really clear everybody else. Much as WWI is more the fault of the Germans and the Austrians than anybody else, but still is sort of everybody's fault.

[minionofmidas]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Pretty standard authoritarian conditions. I certainly don't condone such actions, but it's hardly US policy to start wars over such things. Look at Darfur, for instance. Countless dead and we haven't done anything. Further, nearly all these atrocities took place in the Reagan years when Saddam Hussein was a US ally. It just doesn't make sense as a reason for war.

"US ally" is a somewhat overblown statement, actually. To be quite fair here.

[Michael Z]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Then explain western, or rather UK- and US support for Karimov's regime in Uzbekistan.

The fact that the invasion of Iraq had anything remotely to do with altruism is one of the bigger myths connected to this war.

[minionofmidas]

This is somewhat disturbing, but one must also realize that Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction and had to be removed from power and diplomacy just was not going to do the trick.

Saddam Hussein was a WMD? What does that mean? That's got to be the lamest excuse for no weapons I've ever heard.

Yes, he killed hundreds if not thousands of his own citizens just for not agreeing with him.

Then explain western, or rather UK- and US support for Karimov's regime in Uzbekistan.

The fact that the invasion of Iraq had anything remotely to do with altruism is one of the bigger myths connected to this war.

The fact that the opposition against it was not as united as it needed to be does have a lot to do with Saddam's track record, though.

[frihetsivrare]

Before and during much of the 1990s Saddam Hussein definitely did have WMD.  None of them were made in Iraq, though.  Those weapons were given to him by the US government.  Until 1990 Iraq and the United States were allies, and Iraq was fighting Iran.

Bush and company probably used that to say that Saddam had chemical and nuclear weapons.  But by the mid to late 90s the Iraqi government had gotten rid of them.

To Michael Z:
You cannot forget the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  There is a reason that Americans do not hear about how bad that regime was compared to the NAZIs.  The same thing goes with the Chinese Communists.  The government did nothing to oppose them, in China's case in the last 25 years or so.  In the same amount of time the Chinese government may have killed a greater proportion of their population than Saddam Hussein did in his 21 years in power.  If one includes fetuses as people, that is certainly true.