I lost or seriously annoyed several friends in the lead up to America's shocking and awing Iraq into abject submission. One friend got caught up in the argument that the terrorists could come back with WMD. We all ought to have known that Saddam had no WMD. But Clinton thought they did and so did just about every other Western intelligence agency. Then why were the Turks and the Iranians and the Saudis and the Syrians not clamoring to join our attack on Baghdad? They were closer to Saddam than we were. None loved Saddam and you would think they would all be happier without him in the neighborhood. Some day maybe we will learn the answers to my two questions:
- What did the Turks know about Saddam's WMD?
- What did the Turks tell the CIA about Saddam's WMD?
I never bought this. Saddam had no air force, not a single jet fighter. We paid for the most sophisticated military in history. The last major war without aircraft (or so I can recall) was The Russo-Japanese War. I also still maintain that Rumsfeld's Iraq campaign was based on Patton's drive across northern France. See this article on Patton: http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA391016
Fallacy #3: The Enemy is Saddam.
The enemy is Saddam because ________________. Professor Bainbridge's blog has an interesting discussion on this topic, Is Saudi Arabia the Real Problem?. Read the full post including the comments. I thought it was a stupid diversion from the Taliban and I think the stupidity has been fully proven by events. I asked this question and none of those supporting Bush then had an answer: If we are going into Iraq to take out Saddam because he is a bad person, then what of Mugabe and the junta in Burma? When do we stop policing the other country's bad leaders?
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