Oh
Was Saddam shooting US Airmen in the US? No. He was shooting at them as they flew over his country (frequently as they bombed his country- see link at bottom). That's hardly a danger to the US. He was simply not going to invade the US. He had never invaded the US, or any US possessions. It's ridiculous to be spending the kind of money we are on that sort of threat.
And the biggest aider of terrorists are the Saudis, our "buddies". So clearly, we're not in a huge war halfway across the world because of terrorists, or we'd be camped out in Saudi and not Iraq.
The decision was based on foolish emotionalism- conflation between Iraq and 9/11, silly panty twisting about WMD's, that even HAD Saddam had them would have only been a threat to countries in his area, and some odd notion that we were bringing "freedom" to the Iraqis. I can understand why the little people, who had no access to classified material, were swayed by the moronic rhetoric of this administration, and their incessant prattle that people who weren't with them were on the side of the terrorists- it takes a bit of spine to withstand that sort of jingoistic claptrap, but to defend stupidity NOW, when it is completely clear it was stupidity? There's no excuse for that, and a huge majority of the country knows it. The good news is you are the minority, and your minority group grows ever smaller.
blog.zmag.org
"To sum it up: In the 36 months prior to the now notorious "spikes of activity" year 2002, the "coalition" (overwhelmingly the British and the Americans---perhaps with a touch of Turkey tossed in along the way for a little spice) dropped a total of 641.5 tons of bombs on Iraqi territory, of which 134 tons happened to be dropped by British warplanes, with virtually all of the remaining 507.5 tons having been dropped by American warplanes. This averages out to 17.8 tons of bombs per month, every month, from January, 1999 through December, 2001. Of course, we know from the quarterly breakdown reported above that the first and third quarters of 1999, for example, were spikier than the second and fourth quarters of 2001. Still. These averages are pretty revealing, I think. What they show us is that at no extended period of time during the 51 months prior to the launching of the ground invasion in March, 2003 were the Iraqis free of the threat or actual dropping of bombs upon their territory" |
