Okay, follow me here.
1. The "blunder" of not taking him out during the first war was perpetrated by whom? Do you even know? President Bush and many in his cabinet wanted to remove Hussein. Ultimately, they did not PRECISELY because it would usurp the UN resolutions, thus making the war "illegal." So, let me get this straight. You blame President George H. W. Bush for NOT committing war crimes - and then you blame President George W. Bush for war crimes. See a problem in your logic here?
2. What, exactly, were his war crimes? Let me give you a little bit of history again to clear this up again.
a. Gulf war finishes. Part of the CEASE FIRE. Not, an END to the war, but a CEASE FIRE agreement is that Saddam Hussein and Iraq hand over all their WMD, allow inspectors uninhibited access, and generally be verified that they were no longer in possession of WMD or carrying devices for them (such as rockets that could fly over a certain distance - which he had, and did launch in the second war by the way. So much for him being innocent).
b. When that was not completed, the cease fire was invalidated by his actions. There would be no reason, either withing the US, or in the UN to gain approval for war. A vote by congress and the UN was ALREADY held prior to the Gulf war, and THAT cease-fire agreement was no longer valid, meaning the war was on again. It was purely the restraint of the US for 10 + years that we didn't do anything about it besides launch a few missiles now and then.
c. President George Bush took the UNNECESSARY step in going back to Congress, and to the UN to gain approval to resume an ALREADY LEGAL WAR.
d. The US poured financial resources into Iraq and helped them rebuild their infrastructure Per the Hague Convention rules of war.
The entire "war criminal" line is idiotic at best, and slandering the deaths of thousands of US servicemen and women at worst. Stop it. Just stop it.
3. There's no such thing as "If this, then it will have been justified, if that, then it will not have been." That is petty, hindsight driven trash. Have you seriously even researched who believed he had weapons and why:
a. "The president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had close ties with Hussein, told Vice President Cheney that Hussein did not want war but would use chemical weapons if attacked."
b. German agents - to the degree that they passed on "Hussein's plan for defending his capital. Concentric rings were to be manned by Iraqi units of varying trustworthiness. One of the circles was called the 'red line.' This was to be the final barrier, manned by Hussein's elite and most reliable troops. US military intelligence reasoned that as American troops reached this defense line they would be met by poison gas or germ weapons." (A report of a command from Hussein to launch the weapons was also made during the war. Funny that none of the networks every say anything about it).
c. Hussein's generals, until Hussein informed them in December of 2002 that "Iraq did not possess WMD. The generals were stunned. They had long assumed that they could count on a hidden cache of chemical or biological weapons. Iraq had used such weapons in the war with Iran." That information came from Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister. (These three points are sourced from
this story).
Add to that the intelligence agencies that came to their conclusion that there was WMD in Iraq:
d. Britain
e. Germany
f. Russia
g. China
h. Israel
i. France
j. Hans Blix - the head of the UN inspection team
So much for Bush "being lied to by his intelligence network." By the way, here's a definition of
lie: a false statement made with
deliberate intent to
deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood. So did he lie? No. Did his intelligence agency lie? no. Who lied then? Saddam Hussein. Follow the first link to read the entire story. All in all therefore, your statement makes absolutely no sense. Saddam Hussein brought it upon himself by lying and manipulating the international community.
4. WMD was
not the
reason we went to war. It was the mechanism that allowed us to continue to prosecute a war. It was the technicality that made it much easier to explain. However, the
reason we went to war was because of Hussein's support for terrorists (well documented, including his terror training camps), his destabilization of the mid-east (he was one of the main contributors that paid the families of suicide bombers in Israel), and because, as former Vice President Cheney said, an Iraq with Saddam Hussein in charge created a nexus by which chemical, biological, and maybe even nuclear weapons can be joined with terrorists and terrorist organizations. For that reason, it was not an unnecessary war, but was instead, the
centerpiece of the war on terror,
as it should have been.
Conclusion: your posts in this thread, your thought processes on this subject, and your positions presented here are so far away from reality that they take on a note of poisonous revision, and are outright ludicrous. Either you have bought wholeheartedly into the Goebbels-level propaganda that has been spewed by the left who had their panties in a twist over the 2000 elections, or you know the truth and still choose to spew this trash. In the end, it is ironic what that makes you.
It makes you guilty of doing exactly what you accuse George Bush of: either outright lying, or being completely lied to by the ones you haven chosen to read. From what I know of you from around here, I believe and hope it's the latter, and this thread begins the wake-up call you need to start blaming the one who is REALLY responsible for your friends' deaths in the desert: Saddam Hussein.
- - - Updated - - -
Wrong. We invaded a country that didn't have the weapons THEY claimed they had, at least until Saddam Hussein had to fess up to his generals just before the war began. Once again, look at the first part of my post. You'll find that the Yemen leader was basically TOLD by Saddam Hussein that they would launch WMD at American soldiers.