Sam, the point about Saddam was not what he had already done - though it was bad enough - but what he was going to do after the sanctions collapsed, which was coming in fairly short order.
What were his intentions? His means? His methods? His MO?
Doesn't that matter just a wee bit more than the minutiae of exactly how mature his al Qaeda ties were in 2002, whether his support of the Abu Nidal, Zarqawi, and all the other known terrorists who just happened to show up in Bagdhad on rest holiday constituted formal, provable links to al Qaeda or not?
The story or remains unchanging if you do ever want to discuss what to do NOW. If all you want to do is remained myopically fixed on topics called "Saddam-al Qaeda ties in 2002" and "War in Afghanistan in 2001" and ignore all the happenings in all other places and times, you can do so. I can't stop you. But you have deliberately and wilfully ignored the real reasons for the war, preferring to whack at straw men arguments instead.
There were real reasons for the war, and if the WMDs that everybody believed in turned out not to be in place, what we learned about Saddam's oil bribes, support for foreign and Iraqi terrorists, and AQ Khan's Sam's Club for Nukes, provided reason enough. Now that we know the extent of the bribes being taken by Russia and China, it is obvious that sanctions would have collapsed very soon. That would have restored Saddam's full revenue and freed him to go shopping. What do you think he would have done? What would the Mideast have looked like then?
don't deny that al Qaeda people are in Iraq now. And have fought with Sunni insurgents. However, I have never seen a report from Iraq which suggests that there are more than 1,500 al Qaeda people in Iraq. Most of the reports I've read say that the number is around 1,000. And the reports I have read over the past 6 months or so suggest that the tensions between them that have been there all along have finally erupted to a point where Iraqis are killing the foreign al Qaeda people. Baathists were never "proper" Muslims as Al Qaeda people define it. Indeed, they were secular. Yes, I know, you will say that Sadaam had started to "get" religion to help cement his rule. Even if that is true, he and al Qaeda were still enemies. They may have had a marriage of convenience for awhile, but it was destined to end badly for one or the other of them.
Now at least we are discussing facts. Yes, marriages of convenience do end when they are no longer convenient. But until then, they don't. Thank you for at least admitting that this marriage of convenience exists, not insisting, as our idiot CIA still does along with most leftists, that secular Saddam could never have allied with al Qaeda. I never said that al Qaeda provided most of the insurgents; however, what they provide in suicide bombing expertise and splodeydopes gives them a killrate out of proportion to their numbers. Do you really think that the native Sunni insurgents are setting off chlorine gas dirty bombs in Fallujah and Ramadi? |
