In all the tossing around of facts concerning the Iraq war, there are some that
keep being forgotten. Yes, Saddam is a thug, and his country would likely
(though not provably) be improved by his removal. That's not contested. But
there are any other number of countries about which the same thing could be
said. Now having pointed out that...

1) There has never been one shred of evidence connecting Saddam to 9/11. Not
one. The CIA made a point of saying this, even Bush has never said anything to
the contrary. There are far more threads connecting Saudia Arabia to 9/11 than
Iraq, but we are not going after them.

2) The use of gas against his own people, a hideous act by anyone's measure
(and similar acts have been done by other leaders in other countries against
their own people), but after it happened 13 years ago, Rumsfeld, under Bush
Senior, went to Iraq with $1.2 billion additional aid to support the regime.
If it was okay then for our administration, under one Bush, to have it suddenly
being the reason for this action under the second Bush seems to be rather
arbitrary.

3) The CIA's assessment of Iraq's capabilities, in published reports, has
indicated very clearly that Iraq (which has never directly threatened the US,
unlike North Korea) would almost certainly NOT attack the US unless it were
backed into a corner by invasion.

4) Those who compare Iraq with WW2 Germany ignore the basic historical facts at
stake: Europe sat back and did little during the time when Germany was building
the mightiest war machine in human history, tens of thousands of tanks, planes,
cannons, on and on. But Iraq has only a quarter or so of what was once its
military, and as we see now nightly on the news, their soldiers are poorly
equipped and barely fed. Not one single Iraqi plane has been launched in
response to the invasion. We basically pulverize their cities with absolute
impunity. We'll spend $400 billion this year on the military, Iraq generally
spends about $1.4 billion. So the situations between Germany and Iraq are
simply not comparable at any two contiguous points.

5) If there were WMD present in Iraq, they're certainly taking their time using
them in defense against a force set out to level their cities and depose their
rulers. Which only serves to reinforce the prospect that such weapons are not
there in any useable fashion.

It seems to me that we're attacking Iraq because we know they *don't* have the
weapons to oppose us, and *not* attacking North Korea because we know they *do*
have the weapons that could stop us.

Bush Sr., when asked why he stopped Gulf War I prior to taking down Saddam and
going into Baghdad, said "It would turn the entire Arab world against us." If
that were true then, why is it not true now?

The policy of containment and isolation has worked for these many years, there
was no apparent need for invasion except for the purposes the Adminisration
seems to have in its back pocket, a desire to control a massive oil reserve and
re-draw the map of the middle east in ways that will serve better American
interests.

Bottom line...was it worth all this to achieve the goal? Seventy-four billion
dollars, hundreds of lives, the wrath of the huge sections of the Arab world
who now believe we are what people have -- wrongly, until now -- said we were,
a force for colonization and invasion, in this case into a country that we will
have to occupy and run for years (according to the latest estimates from the
administration), causing destabalization across the whole region?

Was this one man worth all this, when there was so little imminent or plausible
threat?

I think history will say the answer to that question is no.

jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
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