I read stuff like this on conservative websites and I can only shake my head in disbelief. This theory is all based on the notion that Saddam Hussein was a secularist who kept the jihadists out of Iraq and at bay.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hussein was harboring and helping Ansar al Islam for years. The predecessors to bin Laden were Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas abd Abu Zarqawi all of whom were ensconced in Baghdad and all of who who had attacked American interests and killed Americans the most notorious of these murders was the killing of an american Jew on the Achille Lauro who happened to be wheelchair bound.
I'm getting old so it my only concern is for my grandkids who seem to be growing up in a world where our politicians and citizens just have no foresight at all. The Middle East was a huge boil that needed lancing and though we should have lanced it much more violently ala Dresden and Hiroshima it nonetheless needed doing. Bush saw Iraq through while the left and many on the right were screaming for negotiated defeat and deserves much credit for that. To me that was his shining momeent, not standing in the rubble in Manhattan.
Our politicians and our citizens just did not have what it takes to win the peace and that is neither Bush's fault or Cheney's fault. That was is woned by Obama, Congress and the good ole american people.
There's a reason why the U.S. doesn't lay waste to enemies like Iraq. The whole purpose of these nation-building campaigns is to establish and prop up governments so we can do business with them -- and destroying a country kind of defeats the whole purpose of that.
Saddam was a heinous SOB. Unbelievably, ISIS is worse. At least Saddam wasn’t as direct of a threat. Saddam didn’t want to control the world and it was a different time. ISIS has a strong support base in the USA. Saddam didn’t.