Evan,
>I hear what you are saying, but Iraq was a secular totalitarian state. Not an easy environment for religious fundamentalists or terrorists groups to operate. Most likey there are far more active Al Queda in the US, Canada, France, UK...
I agree completely... and with all the scrutiny Iraq was under for many years with UN sanctions and no-fly zones, etc. it would have been very difficult for Saddam to engage in the activities the world was alleging. But somehow the world did believe he was engaged, whether it was purchasing, developing, stockpiling, selling WMDs... and they believed it from the end of the '91 Gulf War right up to the UN talks in late 2002 before we made the decision to invade. For some reason they all now won't discuss that fact.
>I completely disagree. When it came time to take out Afghanistan, the world was there to back the US with deadly force and many of us are still there. Iraq was totally different. Outside of the propaganda bubble of the Bush Adminstration, the case against Iraq as presented was dubious. This is why most of the G8 did not participate.
Funny, though, they did participate in all the UN tough talk preceding the war (how many UN security council declarations of "disarm or be disarmed" were there prior to us putting our foot down and turning words into action). In fact, most of the Bush administration's position was held for 12 years by the UN prior to the war. I believe that non-participation of the G8 is more linked to the Bush administration's unfortunate hard-line stance of "we're going in regardless of what you think... but get behind us anyway." Had we spent more time coalition building I think we would have been supported by most, if not all, those countries.
And actually, the case presented at the time was very compelling. Very few rejected out-of-hand the statements made when they were made. Maybe that was due to the fear of being called unpatriotic or being branded a traitor? Who knows? But only in hindsight have others piled on to call it dubious.
As I've said before, though, time will tell. We haven't captured nearly all the top-level personnel of Saddam's regime or Al-Qaeda's network. Neither have we truly scoured Iraq or hunted down possible avenues of what happened to the WMDs the UN thought Saddam possessed at one point (Pakistan? Syria? buried in the desert somewhere? Sold to terrorist groups/rogue nations? Sitting in a corner somewhere under a lampshade?). We will know the "truth" -- just not as quickly as some would like, myself included.
---J
