Well, that and Iraq would still be in the hands of a non-Jihadi. Unlike it’s current Iranian masters.
I spent the majority of my Army career and all of my post-Army career from 1995 to 2007 working counterterrorism issues, including 15 months on the White House staff shortly after 9/11. The two things that fry my ass more than anything else are the perpetuation of two myths promulgated and, unfortunately, echoed by GW Bush.
1. Iraq was not involved in international terrorism.
Consider: Shortly after he came to power in 1979, Saddam openly stated that terrorism was the “...only means of power projection available to Iraq.”
Sabri Khalil al-Banna, better known as Abu Nidal, one of the most notorious international terrorists ever, operated almost exclusively from Iraq after his separation from Arafat and the PLO. Until he was executed by the Mukhabarat in 2002, he enjoyed the protection of Saddam Hussein. Why?
Like Nidal, Ahmed Jibril separated from Arafat and the PLO and moved the headquarters of the PFLP-GC - an ally of the Syrian and Iraqi Baathist parties, to Iraq for a time. The PFLP-GC was established because, in Jibril’s mind, the PFLP was not militant enough.
Muhammad al-Umari, known in Palestinian circles as Abu Ibrahim, but to us as the “Mad Bomber,” based his operations in Baghdad, enjoyed the protection of Saddam’s government and was responsible for a broad range of bombings of facilities and aircraft.
There are more, but you get the idea...
2. There were no WMDs in Iraq.
This one really bothers me. There are hundreds of articles referencing multiple documented seizures of WMDs and fissile materials. This one from CBS News, no friend of the Bush administration, in 2008 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-secretly-takes-yellowcake-from-iraq/ - documents the seizure of yellow cake and references Saddam’s “nuclear program.” Nuclear is pretty WMD-ish, but there are many more references to Saddam’s nuclear program.
Did Iraq not use mustard gas - a WMD - and other “chemical weapons” against the Kurds and against Iranian forces? Did we not document the movement of presumed WMDs into Syria and, even worse yet, farther south into the Bekaa Valley? Has Syria not used WMDs against its own people at least twice in recent years? Where did that come from?
The truth is that, long after the media’s campaign of “No WMDs” (Read: No reason to go to war in Iraq) and despite the seizure and documented use of WMDs by Iraq, President Bush made a decision that he would not reopen the discussion on Iraqi WMDs.