Posted on 09/30/2014 2:59:12 AM PDT by Cincinatus
The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war.
The October 2002 joint congressional authorization to go to war was not just about fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Other worries prompted broad bipartisan support for the resolution. A majority of Democratic senators (as evidenced by their passionate speeches from the Senate floor) cited many of the resolution’s 23 writs. The latter were mostly concerned with things other than WMD: harboring terrorists, offering bounties for suicide bombers, giving refuge to at least one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects, committing genocide, attempting to kill a former U.S. president, and so on. Hillary Clinton should watch her own 2002 speech from the Senate floor.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
bad links.
Try this link: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389094/iraq-was-then-syria-now-victor-davis-hanson
23 reasons were given to fight Saaaaadam—WMD was number fourteen, if I remember correctly.
Bush then gave Saaaaaadam FOURTEEN MONTHS to get rid of ‘em before he invaded (smart?).
They ended up (buried) in Syria. GUESS WHO has them now??
VDH nails it in this article: his summary of the history of US involvement in Iraq is a devastating critique of the Democrats’ intellectual honesty.
Still, the whole idea of building an inclusive democratic republic in Iraq was a misguided waste of blood and treasure. I am unconvinced that Iraq was really on the road to such a republic before the American withdrawal, largely because such a republic is incompatible with any sort of Islamic fundamentalism.
Perhaps so, but irrelevant. If we had maintained our military and civilian presence there, we could have controlled any tendency towards societal and political disintegration. Hanson makes this very point in regard to post-war Japan and Korea in his article. I am not really concerned whether Iraqi society was "ready for democracy" or not -- it was (and is) in our national interest to have a stable, pro-western regime established in Iraq. We achieved that (at great cost in blood and treasure) and Obama threw it away.
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