zidane1strife said:
What we really got was an old f@rt with a pathetic military with crumbling morale... with few or nearly no wmds... It was a joke, a complete and utter joke.
What we really got was aging yet no less ruthless & barbaric dictator who had demonstrated an unflagging desire for WMD. Saddam's military may have been a joke to the uber-technological & professional US/UK/Coalition militaries, but his secret police was no joke to the innocent Iraqi civilians.
Further, Saddam's pattern was clear - if left to his own devices, he would begin rebuilding his WMD. Even Scott Ritter has admitted in interviews (before his pedofile scandal) that while UNSCOM may have ridded Iraq of 90%+ of its actual WMD, they were unable to rid Iraq of the plans, blueprints, and documents that would allow Hussein to rebuild his WMD capability when the UN pulled back. Does anyone believe the UN would have had the fortitude and perseverance to maintain anti-wmd sanctions on Iraq indefinitely? The sanctions were causing nation-wide pain and hardship on the Iraqi people while Saddam and his regime was hardly affected, and the Hussein sympathizers in the UN (France, probably primarily at the behest of their national oil company Total Fina Elf) was pushing for relaxing or ending the sanctions.
There is an overriding fact to this situation that Bush's administration has not stated in so many words, to the detriment of its own PR efforts. That fact is that
non-proliferation has failed. After the fall of the USSR, non-proliferation took on a huge new importance, and became one of the primary jobs of the UN (and the CIA). The whole point of non-proliferation efforts was to prevent nuclear weapons (and other wmd) from spreading beyond the 5 nuclear nations - US, UK, France, USSR, China. It was successful in confiscating WMD in ex-Soviet satellites that wanted to disarm and rejoin the international community. But it failed elsewhere. During the 90s, India and Pakistan went nuclear, North Korea is on the verge, Iran is on the verge, Iraq was 6 months away by the beginning of Gulf War 1, and who knows what other shadowy terrorist groups are working in secret on the task of acquiring wmd. The whole point of non-proliferation was to prevent tyrancical dicatators or otherwise unstable nations from acquiring the power to exercise mass destruction at the whims of a few madmen. But make no bones about it, non-proliferation has mostly failed.
The only two options that failure left America, are to either allow np to fail completely and start kissing the asses of dicatators and caving to the demands of every other Osama that gets his grubby hands on some wmd. Or, put up a new firewall, draw a line in the sand, and say to would-be Saddams and Osamas, if you cross this line, we will hit you so fucking hard you'll wake up in the next life. Bush & Co. chose the latter, and Osama, North Korea, Iran, and their ilk are getting the message. They're a bit concerned, and rightfully so.
From now on, when the UN backed by the US tells these countries to disarm, the order will be more credible, to say the least. These dictators know they can bribe the French with oil (Google "Total Fina Elf + Iraq") or nuclear reactors (Osiraq/Tammuz1), or the Russians or the Chinese with business contracts, but they now know that they can't do that with the US and UK and the rest of the Coalition. The tyrants' diplomatic options have been drastically reduced.
zidane1strife said:
At the end I think the US exaggerated the threat that saddam posed in order to start the war, and I REALLY doubt they did this with the intention to help the people(that was just a side-effect, although in reality it was the best that came out of all of this.). I'd say it was done probably to stabilize a region, to have a presence there, and other economical reasons...
In a way, perhaps. The administration probably should not have emphasized Saddam's current WMD so much as his obvious pattern of attempting to acquire WMD, the fact that he would most likely return to that pattern once the UN ended sanctions and withdrew, and the fact that at every opportunity he has attempted to elude the UN and the Gulf War 1 cease-fire terms. However, the long-term threat of allowing non-proliferation to completely fail was not an exaggeration. I just think Bush didn't communicate that very clearly b/c he favored the more simplistic argument that "Saddam is a bad man with bad weapons, let's get him".
As for economic reasons, I disagree. If Bush's primary concern was the immediate economic situation, he would never have gone to war. Financial and economic uncertainty tend to drive up interest rates, which stymies buisness investment, which slows economic growth and costs people their jobs. War is one of, if not the, biggest sources of uncertainty. If Bush cared more about the economy than anything else, he would have done what Clinton did for 8 years - avoid war and take potshots at the problem with cruise missiles. We all know how effective that was.
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