Rot in hell.
Good, I’m glad he’s dead, the only sad thing is that it didn’t happen 15 years ago before Chalabi lied us into a needless war for his personal gain, the fools in the national security apparatus believed him, and we lost 4,400 of our best and bravest young men and women, countless others maimed for life, and trillions spent for what?
He was supposed to have been the first post-Saddam president of Iraq, since he was a buddy of Wolfowitz and his DoD cabal. Problem was when he marched off that U.S. transport plane in his black fatigues and small security cohort., nobody in Iraq wanted him because he was a crook and a coward.
Died of a heart attack.
I would not be disappointed to hear that the paramedics took a coffee break on the way to get him.
Is this the guy who had his 14 year-old daughter tearfully lie to Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers come in to the hospital to take babies out of incubators?
Saddam Hussein had repeatedly broken the peace agreement of the Gulf War.
Even Kerry and Clinton were advocating war against Saddam in 1998.
Will Sidney Blumenthal get this headline regarding our war against Libya when Sid dies???
Who’s the money man behind Sid’s lobbying? How much of it did Hillary get?
No single entity pushed the U.S. into the 2003 invasion. A low grade shooting war was waged from the end of the first Gulf War until the second Gulf War in the form of no-fly zones where shots were exchanged between Iraq and coalition (U.S.-U.K.-France) on a weekly basis. This included regular air strikes on Iraqi air defense targets. The Clinton Administration carried out two extensive bombing campaigns against strategic targets in Iraq including the homes of government officials. During the Clinton Administration the National Security Council shifted the strategy in Iraqi from containment to regime change. The NSC and the Pentagon also drew the general scheme for what would be Operation Enduring Freedom.
The constant instability in the Gulf region created in part by Iraqi/Coalition hostilities, UN sanctions against Iraq, and threats by Saddam against all his neighbors, led to a build up of U.S. military assets in the region. This led to escalating terrorist attacks on U.S. targets: 1993 World Trade Center; 1996 Kohbar Towers; bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. In addition al Qaeda attempted to blow up Seattle’s Space Needle in 2000 and to simultaneously blow up 13 airliners in 1995. These operations were directed by Saudis protesting the U.S. military presence on Islamic soil.
The thinking at the time was that a continued U.S. military footprint in the region would become ultimately untenable. But withdrawal from the region would collapse the sanctions and unleash Saddam to accelerate his WMD programs and attack his neighbors or at least intimidate them into complying with his extortion. At the time Iraq was allowing small groups of terrorists a sanctuary where they could train and Saddam was paying $25,000 bounties to the families of suicide bombers who attack Israeli targets.
Bush didn’t destabilize the Middle East because he inherited a region that was already unstable.
For anyone who might have read this far, I am not defending Bush. But the conditions that existed in 2001-2003 and the decisions they shaped cannot be put on a bumper sticker.
“He ultimately succeeded by persuading the United States that Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the September 11 attacks, claims that later proved unfounded.”
That statement is simply not true. There were/are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to this very day. People are worried that ISIS may get their hands on them. Plenty of stories about them in the last couple of years.