but if you did...go back and read any of my own posts prior to the war
I wasn't sharing a thread with you during that period but I have occasion to go back and look at some of my old posts. I just looked now at some of the early stuff that I've clipped both from SI and other sources. I have nearly 400 clips on the subject. It was sad to look at them because one of the first ones I came across was a column by Michael Kelly, who was a favorite of mine.
that there were a host of reasons to do what we did, not simply one.
There were, indeed, several reasons including Saddam's defiance, humanitarian help for Iraqis, oil, Saddam's connections to al Qaeda, and democracy, but the overriding rationale given was that Saddam's WMD's were going to kill us in our beds if we didn't get in there and destroy them. That was the kicker. Personally, I never bought it. Even if he had them, the likelihood of being able to deliver them on a sizeable scale was enough to warrant the risk of war. But for most people I know that went along, both in 3D and here on SI as people struggled with this, it was about us being safe in our homeland. Whether you personally thought this was the salient reason or not, it was the one that got most of the attention and it was the go/no go issue for most people. |
