Ah yes, disregard the past 12 years of broken UN sanctions, etc.
[note: All that moral authority would have been far more credible had the sanction been pushed for by the US government before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.]
Iraq wasn’t a most favored nation, but we were more than willing to work with Hussein right up until the day he invaded Kuwait. Was that likely to change without his invasion of Kuwait?
There's a long list of why Saddam was a bad guy. And when working to sell a war you include that, along with every other justification (that supports your goals). But, you could develop a similar list for probably 10 or 20 percent of the countries in the world that we routinely ignore. We even do a great deal of business with some of them today.
Had Iraq not invaded Kuwait, I doubt there would be any formal political objections to Saddam. In fact, he would probably be supported (as he was pre 1991) as a secular government in the Middle East and an ally against Iran -- forced to take tough measures against Islamic extremists and Kurdish extremists.
Charon
