> The Iraq war seems like it was a bit pointless… <
It was always was pointless. And stupid. And bloody. And counterproductive. Yes, Saddam was a bad guy. Just one of many in this world. But he was also an effective check on the Islamic radicals in Iran.
Bush II did Islam a great favor by eliminating Saddam. Just as Carter did Islam a great favor by eliminating the Shah.
Carter was naive, a little boy. But Bush II was willfully arrogant. I can forgive Carter. I will never forgive Bush II. I hate his guts.
“But he was also an effective check on the Islamic radicals in Iran.”
No, he was not.
Quite the opposite, once his right hand man General al Dhuri persuaded him to embrace Islamic terrorists. That is why Saddam allowed Zarqawi and his Egyptian followers to operate a cell in Baghdad in addition to giving his Anwar al Islam partners free run under the no-fly zone to work for him and assassinate Kurdish officials. This general al Dhuri became Islamic terrorist Zarqawi’s right hand man in ISIS, and once Al Dhuri was freed from his oath to Saddam by Saddam’s death, he immediately swore Bayat to Zarqawi, and al Dhuri’s sons and intel people did as well. Then he had ISIS come flying down out of Syria to retake his home town during the rout caused by Obama’s careless pullout..
Saddam’s right hand General is a deodbandi Muslim, and though they are not Shiite, they are as closely affiliated with them as can be, both sharing the same belief of the end times and the Mahdi.
That’s why Saddam built that huge mosque with the military-looking minarets. That is why his Uruk.net website was spewing his speeches which were written to please Islamic hardliners. I have read those speeches, they were not Baathist speeches, they were radical Islamic speeches. That’s why he modified the national flag. That’s why he instituted sharia law in Baghdad and the old punishments that went along with it, forcing Iraqi doctors to amputate tongues, hands and feet. That’s why Saddam was comfortable sending his air force aircraft to Iran to protect them from the coalition strikes. That’s why his officials and Iran’s were meeting with Islamic terrorist leaders in Sudan.
The same organization that was later named ISIS and ISIL, under the same leadership, had earlier operated right out of Bagdad even before the US invasion, and it’s wing in the north operated under Syrian protection and murdered an American, a USAID official, in Jordan well before the US invasion.
That is why we took Zarqawi out in the fashion we did, in Iraq.
The insurgents in Iraq, in turn, were working with that old Iran-backed foe of ours, Hezbollah’s Imad Mugniyeh, who immediately before he got taken out, had met with with senior Syrian military leaders.
Saddam got over his old Baath party secular socialist ways years before the 2003 invasion.