Iraq had been non-compliant with UN resolutions going back over a decade before Bush decided to take him out.
And what exactly did those violations amount to? We are talking about sacrificing American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars for what? Oh he broke the rules. So? Did violating those U.N. resolutions make him a bona fide threat to the region, to the world....as Bush so aggressively marketed? No, they did not. Some of you seem to think that simply because we can, we should. Do you know what resolutions he actually violated and to what degree?
I personally wouldn't be surprised at all if there was a plan to go into Iraq right from the get go. Saddam violated one UN resolution after another for years and years reducing the UN to an impotent irrelevant powerless joke.
The U.N., by it's very nature, is an impotent, irrelevant, powerless joke. Again, what resolutions did he violate that warranted the destruction we wrought upon that country and all the American lives that were lost?
If Saddam just failed to cooperate and comply and attempted to just give off the appearance that he was far more dangerous then he turned out to have been that's his own dumbass fault as far as I'm concerned.
While he was not cooperative with U.N. inspectors in the end he conceded. The IAEA as well as our own CSG, CIA, and DIA could not with any certainty verify that there were any WMD's at all. In fact the CSG said they were convinced there weren't any and that Iraq was no immediate threat to the U.S. or her allies.
The war was not reasonable and not justified. I know, people like TD will get on here and say "the U.N. resolution, the U.N. resolution!" Reasonable men don't kill each other over the terms on a piece of paper. Reasonable men kill when they have to in order to protect someone or some thing. In this case, the response was unquestionably heavy handed and
not necessary.
There are so many U.N. missions in which the U.S. chose not to send troops to support that warranted military action to save lives that were in imminent danger. But Iraq, well...Iraq that just HAD to be done.
Bush had been told by his people that there was almost no evidence of WMD's in Iraq. There was raw, unvetted intelligence and speculation coming from the intelligence community. He knew this when he told us we had to take action NOW to disarm Saddam because he was a threat to the world. It was a deliberate deception, he mislead this nation to war and he knew what he was doing. There are plenty of books documenting this, people are named.
Now you can choose to blow off these insiders who were involved and make all manner of excuses as to why you shouldn't pay them any attention, or you can look at the fact that we didn't find any WMD's. The CSG said they weren't there and they were dismissed. And guess what...they weren't there. All you have to do is look at the accounts that these people are telling, start checking dates, and listen to what Bush is saying to the public. It was a tragic, tragic series of events that even I was sucked into as an American citizen.