I wrote this to clarify what I'm thinking after the Iraq Survey Group report was published. Any mistakes?He had weapons of mass destruction capable of attacking our country.No he didn't.
Well, he had weapons of mass destruction.No he didn't.
He had the capability of producing nuclear weapons.Turns out he didn't.
He had weapons of mass destruction related programs.To what extent were they developed? He didn't have the capability. Also, his ability to fund real programs was in question.
But he had intent!He sure did. My neighbor intends to beat his wife one day, but the cops won't listen to me. According to the CIA, Saddam also wanted weapons of mass destruction to protect himself from Iran. "He had a lot of intent. He didn't have capabilities. Intent without capabilities is not an imminent threat."
David Kay, ex-chief US arms inspector, 10/7.
He aided the 9/11 terrorists.No, he didn't.
He had al Qaeda connections.Very tentative connections at best. al Qaeda and Saddam considered themselves enemies. Other leaders and countries have stronger connections, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Look at the map near the bottom of this State Department web page, which was created shortly after 9/11. Note which country is missing from the listing of countries where al Qaeda had operated.
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/terrornet/12.htmSaddam was a bad man.Undoubtedly. He was a horribly bad man who was contained by sanctions.
He used WMDs on his own people.While the US, who had supplied some, looked the other way. According to the latest report, he had no WMDs after 1991.
He continued to kill many of his own people.Yes, sadly, he did. If this was the reason for invading (and it wasn't), we might have invaded other countries first, countries with equally violent and dangerous leaders, including a few of our allies. It can be reasonably argued that our invasion killed more innocent Iraqis in the past years than Saddam would have. Certainly our invasion killed more children.
Still, the world is safer without Saddam.If Saddam had been taken out with international backing, yes. But we're not safer at this time, because of the manner in which Saddam was taken out: in a preemptive invasion against the judgement of many other countries. Now, if Saddam had truly been an immediate threat, it's easily arguable that a largely unilateral invasion would be justified. If one accepts the arguments above, though, his threat to the world wasn't imminent. The world is growing increasingly more dangerous as a result of our wasting resources in Iraq instead of hunting al Qaeda.
Recruitment for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is tremendous because or the resentment over our invasion of Iraq, and, while we were in Iraq, the terrorist organizations have morphed organizationally into systems much harder to detect and control. We haven't even caught the D.C. anthrax perpetrator. Aren't we worried that the anthrax attacks could begin again? Money spent in Iraq could instead have bolstered our port and border security. Both North Korea and Iran have advanced their nuclear programs. We have lost the trust of most of the international community and purposefully alienated some of our best allies. As a country our word is suspect in the international community. Because we're stretched so thin in Iraq, if real trouble erupts somewhere else, we will be very hard-pressed to deal with it militarily.
But Kerry and others in our government saw the same intelligence as Bush.No, they didn't. They saw what the Bush administration cherry-picked from their sources. They didn't see, for example, the August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing which warned that Osama bin Laden "was determined to strike within the United States." They didn't know that some in the intelligence community were being threatened and exposed for speaking out about intelligence which contradicted what the Bush Administration wanted. They were told by the Bush administration that Iraqi drone planes could drop biochemical agents over American cities. Condoleezza Rice warned them about mushroom clouds over New York and Washington.
The intelligence was faulty.Some was. Some wasn't. The Bush administration chose to believe the faulty intelligence which meshed with its own beliefs. At least some in the intelligence community did try to tell the Bush administration that their assessment of the intelligence was not solid, as did intelligence officials from other nations, as did governments of other nations.
Even France, Germany, and other countries thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.At the time, I suspected so too. Many of us made the mistake of taking the Bush administration at its word.
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