No, Hussein’s actions and threats were. People chose to ignore everything Hussein was doing and harp on the fact that the only thing that ever mattered was the fact that no WMD’s had ever been found. As things stand now:

1. Bush said there were terrorist connections, that has been proven.
2. Bush said Hussein was in violation of the 1993 cease fire, that has been proven.
3. Well coordinated and financed terrorists were striking the US all over the world with NO repercussions.
4. Bush said Hussein had WMD’s, Russia and Germany said he did not. Hussein refused to allow us to check for them. Now that we’re there, we’re apparently finding them all over the place. According to the UN, they could have been there but well hidden. Hell, they’re apparently not even well hidden at this point.
5. Bush said a threat was Hussein supplying terrorists with those WMD’s to attack the US. Since it’s obvious he had them, and it’s obvious he had terrorist attacks, it’s obvious that COULD have been a threat.

In other words, every single reason given to finish the job has turned out to be true.

Would you have just preferred, as many others do, to pretend none of what Hussein threatened would have ever come to fruition? Losing 2,500 soldiers sucks. However, they were prepared for that possibility. The people in the African Embassies and victims of 9/11 were not. That’s the type of war Hussein was fighting against the US. He didn’t have the balls to just come right against our military. Rather, he was using proxies like Al Islaam and Al Qaeda via the Taliban to do his fighting against innocent civilians. I prefer to fight that war somewhere else other than downtown New York City.

If you’d prefer we hadn’t done the right thing, we would have saved $300 billion, but we’d probably be losing 2,500 civilians instead of soldiers. It’s your call. I’m fine with the call Bush made.

I’ve been sick and tired of this “Bush lied” crap from day one. As I noted on other boards, Bush, in an interview well before the election, stated he was more than ready to take Saddam out if elected. People elected him. He never said otherwise. Then, after things got nasty and Bush gave the UN WAY TOO MANY WARNINGS to do the right thing, he utilized a war powers act that had been passed a decade before and ignored while we got shot at all over the planet. How many major terrorist attacks have occured since? How long do we have to keep waiting before people like finally give up and admit that taking out Hussein and focusing the terrorists on someplace other than US soil has accomplished something? How long will people like you stick the fantasy that this is purely a coincdence?

It’s not. We’re dealing with them on our terms now instead of theirs. Instead of having innocent unarmed civilians being shot at, we’re shooting at them first. I wish not one single soldier had died in the process, but what they’re fighting for is worth it and the soldiers I do know KNOW it’s worth it no matter how people like you belittle what they’re doing.

There are vast differences between the Iraq/US relationship and the UK/Iraq relationship. So, it’s not very easy to mix the three together and compare notes. I’m not going to pretend I have a clue what all was going in the mind of Blair. However, I am extremely confident in what I state about the US/Iraq relations. You have to understand first and foremost that the US, in legal terms, declared war on Iraq in 1991. The terms of the ceasefire were that Hussein destroy all WMD’s. It wasn’t that he stop producing them, or hide them, or anything else. He had to destroy them all with UN verification. He refused to allow veification up to the point of shooting missiles he was not supposed to have at our monitor flights. Along the timeline, the US was getting bombed all over the planet by someone hiding in Afghanistan. 9/11 was not an isolated attack. The USS Cole had just occurred, our embassies had been bombed in Africa, and the World Trade Center itself had been attacked eight years before by the same group hiding in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban. New documents have been translated that proves beyond a doubt that Hussein was working with the Taliban to coordinate Al Islaam in Iraq and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. It is no longer a question of doubt. What the anti-war people in the US have been arguing is that there was no evidence of WMD’s in Iraq, and there was no evidence Hussein had any connections to terrorist groups. That was not true then, and it’s even clearer now that it never was true. I just get tired of people twisting the story every time what they don’t want to hear is proven wrong. Now, if people want to argue the merit of whether it was worth it, knowing Hussein still had WMD’s and had terrorist ties, to have taken him out and gotten into the quagmire that is Iraq, that’s fine. But that’s not what they’re doing here. They change the story every time. Now, the headlines are reading that Hussein didn’t produce WMD’s after 1991. That’s not what caused the 1991 war, and that’s not what caused the cease-fire to have never been lifted by the US Congress. There were not supposed to be any in Iraq, period. He had told the UN repeatedly he had destroyed them all. Even Duelfer Report, which started all the “lies” claims, says there were none there. They were there obviously. And apparently, they weren’t even hidden all that well. How di Duelfer miss them if soldiers have stumbled accross 500 in 3 years? That’s BS.

Now, like I said England’s history is totally different and I make no claims one way or the other on why Blair made the decisions he made. However, lying that there were WMD’s or no terrorist ties definitely has to be taken out of the equation at this point. That’s a given now, not speculation. The only speculation is how deep those ties were and how much control Hussein actually had over those WMD’s.