Stupid article.
First and I will stand by this no matter how many freepers rant at me now (most supported it then, though):
Every, and I mean every, intel agency on earth—Russia, Israel, France, England, Australia, Japan, China, Egypt, Jordan plus our own said there were WMDs in Iraq. The UN said it. Mubarak said it. King Hussein of Jordan said it.
Any president in W’s shoes right after 9/11 would not only have been impeached & removed but JAILED for not taking action in such circumstances. It doesn’t matter that in retrospect they were mostly wrong (most analysts think the WMDs were moved to Syria, where they HAVE been used). The point is, right after 9/11 the possibility that terrorists could either extract WMDs from Saddam voluntarily or steal them easily was just too great a threat to ignore.
Second, had Rummy insisted we leave without nation buildling, I will remind everyone that up to that point-—when we took Baghdad-—it was the least costly war in American history and our forces had moved faster and captured more territory than Patton’s 3rd Army did. The nation-building was the problem, not the military advance.
Once Saddam was captured, it should have been “mission accomplished.”
Our troops were officially withdrawn in 2011, according to Wikipedia.