No military person in their right mind considered a Saddam Hussein attack on the US using stockpiles of WMDs to be a threat. He didn’t have the projection power and he didn’t have the delivery systems. He didn’t have the projection power to do so in his own region.
Why does everyone analyze this so incorrectly? It isn’t that he had stockpiles of WMDs (although he did). It is that he could (and did) produce lethal chemical and biological agents. Period. That’s it.
So What?
If you can put insecticide in a can of RAID and spray it on bugs, then you can do the same with humanicides and spray it in a crowd. The delivery system and projection system are the same: terrorists. One droplet of nerve agent will kill a human being.
One aerosol can of humanicide in a packed stadium or open air festival in the USA could kill hundreds/thousands and terrorize millions.
So, the bottom line: it was the PERSON of Saddam Hussein, supporter of terrorists, gassings, murders, and assassination plots that was the problem....or would have been for any reasonably intelligent president.
Removing Saddam Hussein was a calamitous mistake of monumental proportions.
His regime was no threat to America, but was a big threat to Iran and to those Islamic fanatics who would threaten Christians and Jews!
He was the force that protected Iraq’s minorities.
I say this as a Conservative and NOT a damned Republicrat!
The proper strategy for the ME after the mid sixties should have been to re-colonize the oil zones and remit a token amount to the arabs. If we wanted to change the culture - probably not possible due to it being Moslem culture, then we should have taken over and operated the school systems for a couple of long generations. The schools are why the arabs in Gaza and the West Bank can never desire anything but death to Jews. It is what the schools teach in every grade and every class. You can’t mitigate that in the resulting adults. It has become part of their psychological DNA. It is why we will never get our own culture back, why elections are of no use any more. Our public schools have taught no history or civics for several generations now. The schools have taught victimery and dependence. We now have a huge population of dependent victims who can only look to the government for the very air they breathe.
good post - Bush did have the support of Congress, the people, the Western world, and also many ME countries. And one other matter is being overlooked. The UN - Bush was going to the UN for a resolution to go into Iraq. It seems like it was twelve years and many resolutions - usually blocked by Russia (Iraq was Russia’s client state and supplied their military material and advisors.) Eventually the UN did provide the resolution to invade and the coalition, led by the US, did so in a mighty way. The military war was won in a text book type victory - winning peace was something else.
Not without planning on occupying Iraq for at least 20 years.
We didn’t kill enough of Saddam’s serial killers under him.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3290999/posts
We had some very tough relatives, who served in post war Japan and Germany. Their assignments were to find and neutralize Nazis trying to resurrection the Nazi nation and the same in Japan re ridding that nation of its serial killers.
Yes.
We should have taken down the House of Saud first. Then ask, “Who’s next?”
Thank you for a wonderful article! Leave it up to Dr. Hanson to put this into it’s proper perspective. Some of these GOP candidates should have him as their advisor. I like what someone else said in another thread. If a reporter asks a GOP candidate the question “knowing what you know now would you go into Iraq?” The answer should be “If I knew that a democratic President would betray the American people and pull all of the troops out to allow the enemy to re-take the lands which American blood won, then no I would not go into Iraq.”
VDH ping ...
Maybe or maybe not, but remember we LOST the war when O’Idiot pulled out the Americans.
That claim about Bush is based on one failure. The failure to to deny there wasn’t any WMD found, when there was.
By making a political decision not to refute it led to what we’re wittnessing now. Who’s fault was that ? Who was the architect of that reasoning ? And why are Republicans still supporting such people ?
“Were we right to take out Saddam?”
I think it was a major strategic error.
It resulted from lack of strategic understanding, confused thinking, and fantasy concepts.
The enemy was (and is) Wahabi/Deobandi Islam. Victory would be defined as we stop (permanently) worrying about them, because they start worrying about and continue to worry about us.
Wahabi/Deobandi Islam had no foothold in Iraq, because Saddam would not allow it. Had we embarked on the conquest of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which is what we should have done, Saddam would have become a valuable ally. He already demonstrated his prowess at killing Iranians (without, BTW, substantial naval or air support), which skill could have proved most useful as a rational strategy evolved after American governors were installed in Riyadh and Islamabad.
So, no, not only were we not “right” to take out Saddam (kind of a childish expression), we were stupid and foolish to do so.
It’s debatable but the same thing is going on right now in Syria. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t?
Taking out Saddam, Kadafy, Mubarek and the Shah of Iran will prove to be one of the worst foreign policy disasters in our history. Hindsight is 20-20 but they kept things under control.
Yes.
Where we went wrong was staying and trying to “nation build” after we got him.
We should have declared victory, brought all the troops home, had parades through every major city and been done with that stink hole.
Point number 2 was why I would have been happy if Clinton had taken Saddam out. B.O. obviously blew it by leaving too early. The blood letting in Iraq is B.O.s legacy.
Yes.
We did what we thought was right at the time, only problem was GW didn't run for a third term and dumbass took over and screwed everything up...
And in regards to Benghazi, he was running guns thru there into Syria the same as he did with ‘fast and furious’ and everyone in his administration knew about it and kept quite and now look at ANOTHER mess dumbass made....
We can debate this till the cows come home, it is irrelevant. We went and executed that war. Congress approved and most of America approved at the time.
The truly calamatous mistake was pulling our troops out. The middle east is a mess today because democrats are evil and they sided with evil...