...As we now know, Saddam Hussein was telling the truth. He had no WMD, had in fact gotten rid of them in 1991 when the U.N. passed a resolution demanding that he do so. Well, the administration of which you are the chief legal officer then insisted the war was justified because of Al Qaeda connections to Saddam’s regime. We don’t need a permission slip from the UNSC if we see there is a potential threat from a government somewhere, anywhere, that might develop WMD and give them to Al Qaeda, who would then sneak them into the United States and cause catastrophic loss of life. But now we find Saddam was absolutely telling the truth that he had no contact with Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden and that the one overture that came from Al Qaeda to an Iraqi official several years ago, asking assistance from Baghdad, was rebuffed. Apparently our intelligence agencies knew all this, as the 9-11 Commission has since discovered, but the administration you serve chose to believe otherwise. The war went forward and the mission was accomplished, at least in its formal military phase. Estimates of the number of Iraqi military and militiamen killed in combat range as high as 60,000 and estimates of the collateral damage to civilians range from 16,000 to 35,000 deaths.
Saddam Hussein was eventually located in his spider hole and whisked away, put under lock and key in a secure prison, with the idea that he would eventually be turned over to a duly constituted court of law and tried as a war criminal. President Bush on many occasions has pointed out that Iraq is better off without Saddam because his regime was known to have used “torture and rape rooms” at Al Ghraib prison. Now you know President Bush did not order our military people to use those same rooms to rape and torture Iraqi “detainees.” He says so and I believe him. But I wonder if you have evidence that Saddam ordered the Iraqi state or local police to “torture and rape,” or might he also insist as Mr. Bush has that he was at the tippy top of the national government and if he had known what excesses were committed by local cops, he would have put a stop to it.
To tell you the truth, John, as far as I can recall, there have been no assertions of the “brutality” of Saddam’s regime from anyone but the Iraqi exiles associated with Ahmet Chalabi or those Kurds who fought on the Iranian side in the Iran/Iraq war. There are all kinds of anecdotes about Saddam doing dreadful things, entire books written about them, but the source of all of them is the same pool of people who have been feeding faked “evidence” of WMD and Al Qaeda connections to our government. Can it be that there is nothing that Saddam has done all these years that cannot be justified as the permissible acts of a head of state acting in defense of his people. Yes, he invaded Kuwait in 1990, but in retrospect that was a really easy war to justify, given the economic warfare being conducted against Iraq by the Emir of Kuwait. I mean easy in relation to now having to justify this American invasion and destruction of good chunks of Iraq, on false premises.
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