I remember that airliner training aid but Saddam was a bush league sponsor of outside terror. Very minor. He was more concerned with terrorizing within Iraq and ruling Iraq. It was not worth invading for that amount of terrorist training
Take Iran...now that was and is a real state sponsor of terrorism.
“He was more concerned with terrorizing within Iraq and ruling Iraq.”
Well, he seemed interested in fighting an eight-year war with Iran, with invading Kuwait, and with positioning his military for an invasion of Saudi Arabia.
The only external terrorism that Saddam directly engaged in was against expatriot Iraqis whom he believed were threats to his regime. This information is in the Iraq Study Group report sponsored by Bush after Gulf War II. No one reads it so Saddam’s terrorism gets reported as something akin to Al Qaeda’s, which it wasn’t.
Saddam was a Baathist, not an Islamist. At times he would throw a bone to the Islamists but it wasn’t what motivated him.
“It was not worth invading for that amount of terrorist training”
Perhaps not.
There is a fakenews narrative that Saddam had no WMD, and practically everyone seems to be buying into it. However, Saddam was playing games with UN nuclear inspectors, and had already used gas on the Kurds. Suitcase nukes were loose in the wild. Bush was advised by our intelligence agencies and by the Brits that Saddam had WMDs.
Bush says that it was when somebody asked him if Saddam would give WMDs to terrorists if he had them that he, Bush, realized that Saddam had to go.
Bush needed to fight back against the fake news, but he didn’t. I don’t know why.