The wrong war/Why Iraq was a mistake

Minneapolis (Red) Star Tribune ^ | January 13, 2004

[Windsong]

"Americans are so accustomed to living in peace and so unaccustomed to the horrors of war..."

Try saying this at Fort Bragg and seeing what kind of reaction you get.

[The Old Hoosier]

Unless you are one of the very few Americans who has seen battle, you don't know fear is, or what it's like to want to run for your life. None of us do.

In some places, like Saddam's Iraq, running for your life could be the national pastime.

[presidio9]

Unless you are one of the very few Americans who has seen battle, you don't know fear is, or what it's like to want to run for your life. None of us do.

A lot of us here in NYC beg to differ.

[Theophilus]

The editorial is false. Saddam himself posed a massive risk to the world. He was personally in the possession of $750,000 in U.S. currency! More than enough to carry out another 9/11. 9/11's don't require nuclear, chemical or biological capability but they do require funding. Money + Evil Intent = Potential Mass Destruction.

[nathanbedford]

Sorry, I didn't know they were on the list.

Is there such a list somewhere?

[The Old Hoosier]

That's why I used to live there. :-)

But actually, the stats show it's much safer than where I am now.

[goldstategop]

Wow... basically The Red Star's editors think President Bush sold a case that turned out to be exaggerated or misleading and that the benefits aren't worth the costs. The reply to the first accusation is that WMD are turning up in Iraq - over the weekend there was a report around Basra of artillery shells turning up coated with a chemical agent and who knows where the rest are hidden and whatever Saddam's links to Al Qaeda are, he isn't talking and he knows what terrorist groups besides AQ that he sponsored over the decades in power. Some exaggeration! As for the case for the war being made in a misleading manner, its easy to say in hindsight it wasn't terribly strong but what's conveniently forgotten is that until Nikita Dean came along, politicians and the consensus in the foreign policy AND intelligence community was Saddam posed a clear and present danger to our national security. Now that's he been captured he looks perfectly harmless. That's one of the many benefits of our winning the war but you aren't hearing The Red Star relate them to its readers since it would then be clear that the Middle East is a much safer place with the downfall of Saddam and its made our prosecution of the War On Terror much more focused. The benefits aren't worth the costs? American citizens don't have to worry about terrorists smuggling in a dirty bomb into the United States with the assistance of a hostile government and besides, not everything can be measured by a line on a financial ledger and this is the first instance I can recall in which the Left is worried about how much this costs when they have never before been concerned with what anything else cost before. The price of a safer world will never be quantifiable and is worth the sacrifices made by our brave troops overseas. God Bless America.

[Silverdrake]

The real, unspoken argument for the war in Iraq, which Bush will never make, is that it will cripple the spread of Islam and the terrorism that necessarily accompanies it.

Bingo! I just wish he'd made the case he made with less totally transparent BS. The overstatement about WMDs was bad enough, but then the retcon of Al Qaeda ties on top of it was utter stupidity. He should have appealed to the UN's "ego" and hammered every violation the inspectors turned up rather than allowing them all to be swept under the rug.

Then, if the other countries still stalled, simply gone with the express permission we already had from UNSCR687 and taken Saddam out for ceasefire violations.

That would have been an unbreakable case.

[Silverdrake]

The editorial is false. Saddam himself posed a massive risk to the world.

The reason that Saddam was a massive risk to the world was because by his, and the Arab world's, reasoning, he *won* the first Gulf War. He was still in power at the end, and that meant that the whole thing was nothing but an exercise in Western lack of resolve. Another sign of weakness.

He thus became even more of a rallying point for Arab nationalism, an icon of the extemists. Living proof that the West didn't have the guts or ability to actually put fangs in their threats, to follow them to the logical conclusion.

And that, more than anything else, was why Saddam had to go. The true "shock and awe" was taking down him and his filthy regime when (in Arab cultural views) history had proved that it couldn't be done.

Anyone who thinks that wasn't a major step in the war on Islamic extremist terrorism should go learn more about the cultures that spawned it.