Saddam was a threat

Clinton had a hard on for Japan, and never let up with Japan-bashing. Haven't heard of any Japan-bashing once the Clinton regime was over and the W. Bush regime took over. W. Bush lived in China when George Sr. was the ambassador and he doesn't hate Asians. But W. Bush hates Arabs, he declared war on Islam prior the 911, when in the summer of 2001 when he had Colin Powell veto Arab resolutions at the UN Conference on Racism in South Africa. W. Bush has always had a hard on for Arabs and Muslims. But Oonce the W. Bush regime is over, the obsession with the Arabs and Muslims will be over with it. Obama, Clinton, democrats don't have a hard on for the Arabs and Muslims. They will pull out and leave the Arabs and Muslims alone to do whatever they want with Israel. There's alot of land in Utah for the Israelis to move to.

Agreed... Rolling Stone has some good insight into the use of fear mongering by Bush / Cheney

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18137343/the_fear_factory

Even if the US pulled out, moved every Jew in Israel to other countries and let Palestinians free rule in the land they left so arab countries could try and bomb it, it would not change the fact that the average muslim has low education, a poor standard of living and will still be suspectable to being swayed by someone claiming that need to do something "in the name of Islam'. It's as much politics as religion at this point. They don't even follow their quaran.

So just let the Arabs, Persians, and Caucasian Muslims do just that and kill each other for Allah all they want. Why spent trillions of taxpayers money meddling in their affairs. Why send young Americans to die when the cause is hopeless. Why use U.S. taxpayers money to fund Israel when history tells us that the odds of them being around for long term are zero. The Muslims have to sell the oil on the open market. Venezuela, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, can yap all the b.s they want, but at the end of the day, sell oil for U.S. dollars, on the open market.

Runningart2004 wrote:

North Korea is a threat, Iran is a threat, Pakistan is a threat....what's your point?

Alan

My point is that Bush could have leveraged his presence of troops massed in Kuwait to get Saddam to agree to continuous inspections by the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which doesn't need UN approval. If that sounds radical, surely it's no more radical than invading the country. And since the IAEA was already saying in March 2003 that Saddam had no nuclear weapons program, it would have been possible to monitor him, since we would have known what steps he would have had to take to develop the weapons, which IAEA President Mohamed ElBaradei would have taken eight years. Surely containing Saddam in any attempt to develop nuclear weapons in the future would have been better than the quagmire that we have now.

The Iraq Survey Group Report already contains the findings presented in the WSJ article. You obviously haven't read the report. If you had, you would know that Saddam's motivation for obtaining WMD in the future was to deter Iran, which arguably would have been in the interests of the US.

Here are some key findings:

1) Iran was the pre-eminent motivator [of Saddam's desire to rebuild Iraq's WMD capability].

2) Saddam’s primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the Regime.

The idea that Saddam would work with Al Qaeda to strike the US is absurd, since Al Qaeda would be quick to claim credit and Saddam's role might be detected, which would guarantee a military reaction with the world's blessing.

Saddam wanted the sanctions lifted so that he could sell oil on the open market. There was nothing for him to gain by being linked to Al Qaeda, which is a radical Islamic jihadist group whose whole focus is on attacking the US. Saddam viewed them a threat to his own power.

You certainly haven't "discovered" a buried story. This is old information that you have finally stumbled onto. And you've uncritically swallowed whole the WSJ's pro-Bush spin.

I agree with RunningArt - how many of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis??? Now how many were SAUDI??? And where did much of the funding for their training come from?

And, if you actually believe Bin Laden was responsible for masterminding 9/11 - his stated point for declaring jihad against the US was US military presence in SAUDI ARABIA from the first gulf war and not the Palestinians in Israel.

Saddam was a very bad man, but he was not insane, and would not have carried out any attack against the US that could have been traced to him, since he knew he would have been nuked off the map. He was also a secular ruler who feared religious extremism, so he would never have helped AQ inside his own country if they could have turned against him.

Iraq was no imminent threat (and the US probably provided most of the weapons they had from our support in the Iran-Iraq war, so we had to know).

Saudi Arabia is the real threat, but the US is so addicted to oil that we will continue to be their b*tch for a while.