Marching Down Blunder Road
Was Saddam Hussein a danger because his arsenal included weapons of mass destruction? That was the pretext for the 2003 Iraq invasion, which left thousands of American soldiers dead or maimed while visiting death and destruction upon millions of Iraqi civilians.
The region has been in turmoil ever since because the guys chosen by our government to take Hussein’s place have turned Iraq into a terrorists’ paradise. During Hussein’s secular dictatorship any religious fanatic—particularly one with ties to his sworn enemy, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden—was simply shot on sight. No Iraqis were among the hijackers orchestrating the 9/11 attacks; yet members of the George W. Bush Administration claimed there were. So the “best” reason for deposing Hussein was those WMDs we never could find.
Then came the October 2014 New York Times story about U.S. soldiers first encountering chemical weapons in Iraq in 2004! Finally the apparent madness of the invasion made sense. Could Bush and Dick Cheney have been vindicated? And if so, why hadn’t they been bragging about the discovery of Iraq’s chemical weapons?
