"President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law October 31, 1998."
Let's see. That was before 9/11/2001, wasn't it? You know, the day everything changed? True, you could argue that Iraq, isolated and under pretty tight control with no connection to Al Qaeda, became an even greater threat in the aftermath of those events for reasons that are at best unclear. Or you take the neocon tack that removing Saddam and installing a pro-Western democracy would have a domino effect over the whole Middle East as countries topple right and rightish in their own democracy movements. Unfortunately, Iraq seems to be a pretty stout domino...
I don't think you can make the argument that this bill was intended to support military force to effect regime change. If it were, you would see terminology like "every effort necessary" or "by any means" instead of "support efforts". Given the total lack of any substantive change in the status of Iraq or events connected to Iraq in the years after this bill was signed into law makes the current incursion seem, well, excessive. Now true, if many, or heck, any, of the hijackers on 9/11 were Iraqi, it might have been different. Or if they weren't Iraqi, but trained in Iraq. Or even if one of the tickets had been charged to an Iraqi credit card. It might be different. Any connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda would be surprising. UBL had Iraq on its list of Middle East regimes that needed to be replaced, and Saddam expended a lot of effort in identifying and eliminating threats to his power. Yeah, the US was probably the biggest threat. But cooperating with a group that is also a threat to him in fielding an action that is only going to get the biggest threat pretty angry at him and maybe motivated to do something doesn't seem to be a smart thing to do... |
