You may recall that INITIALLY there were two reasons cited as to why we should depose Saddam: He was a threat to the United States because of his weapons of mass destruction, and his ties to Al Qaida. It wasn't until those reasons were disproved and the administration began scrambling for other reasons to justify the invasion that the bullshit about spreading democracy across the middle east came into play. And if you want to continue to believe in that as justification for the deaths of almost 2700 American soldiers, over 200 other coalition troops, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians (casualty statistics), fine, so long as you realize that someone came up with that one only afterwards.
According to the new Senate report, plenty of people in the intelligence community were disputing the ties between Saddam and terrorists:
Far from aligning himself with al-Qaida and Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Hussein repeatedly rebuffed al-Qaeda's overtures and tried to capture Zarqawi, the report said. Tariq Aziz, the detained former deputy prime minister, has told the FBI that Hussein "only expressed negative sentiments about [Osama] bin Laden."
Meanwhile. even while members of the intelligence community were warning those ties didn't exist, the Bush people were publicly citing those non-existent ties as justification to go into Iraq.
And let's also keep in mind that Iraq was NOT some sort of emerging regional superpower (like Iran is today) back in 2003. It was instead a virtually bankrupt country, its economy already choked by more than ten years of sanctions. And militarily it was helpless, with the United States enforcing no-fly zones over the northern and southern thirds of the country. Sure, every now and then an anti-aircraft would lock unto American planes, but our air-to-ground missiles would quickly eliminate those threats.
I sometimes wonder if Bush stays up late at night trying to wash the blood from his hands.
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