Originally posted by Sandman
Don't get me wrong. I didn't agree with the invasion, and I still do not. I don't consider the election to be justification for an invasion. It's just one small step on the long road towards stability and U.S. withdrawal from the area.
As Powell said... we broke it, we bought it.
Much as I respect Powell (I'd even vote for him if he ran for major public office), this an inherently false position. Iraq was broke before we liberated it. It was a source of terrorism abroad and tyranny at home. It failed to live up to the cease-fire agreement that ended GW-I, not to mention in material breach of over a dozen UN resolutions calling for it to comply with the same. It's people, except for the elite, where being ground into the dust beneath in in-human despot's boot, gassed, starved, raped, machine-gunned, and kept voiceless and faceless. To claim it was not broke is akin to saying Hitler's Germany was a civilized utopia.
Finally, as has been born out by every report by the weapons inspection regimes, there is no doubt that Saddam never gave up his ambitions to build a WMD arsenal. Whether or not he had them at the time of the invasion is irrelavent. He maintained not only the will, but the technical means to build them. It was his responsibility to convince the world he had destroyed them, and the infrastructure to reconstitute those programs.
