Even Reports of WMD's Discovered in Iraq Proves War was Unjustified

We're still having this debate?

Almost a dozen years after the invasion, and people are still trying to justify the unjustifiable?

It truly is staggering!

The Iraq war proved to be a disaster for the United States, as well as some of the countries that sent far more limited forces, and spent far less staggering resources, towards the war.

Remember that the war was supposed to be won very quickly and decisively, within days or weeks but not months (and I wonder how people were not more skeptical of just how serious a threat to world peace Saddam's Iraq was if his regime could be dismantled so quickly and thoroughly?). Also, the Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms as liberators.

Why, it was going to be the greatest liberation operation that Americans forces had engaged in since World War II and, just like back then, we were going to be the world's darlings, selflessly fighting a war in order to do so!

Then, some strange things happened. No Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's) were found. There were reports of methods of torture being employed by American forces at Abu Ghraib, which coincided with the Bush regime's efforts to legalize certain interrogation methods that many people had previously viewed unquestioningly as torture. There was rampant corruption by enormous corporations that had no shame, and there were news reports of no-bid contracts to privileged agencies.

Oh, and those pesky news headlines about how the war was really going. That Bush's bold " Mission Accomplished" speech proved premature, as the most fierce fighting happened after this declaration of victory. Thousands of Americans died, and freedom of the press was curtailed when photographs and images showing the caskets were banned. The financial price tag for the invasion was far, far higher than most Americans expected, reaching in the hundreds of billions and, ultimately, even trillions. We were not welcomed with open arms and, in fact, much of the rest of the world began to view as with a level of skepticism and, yes, disdain that, quite frankly, Americans were not used to. It took some adjusting to try and get used to it. Suddenly, to many people, the United States itself began to look like a threat to world peace, and a poll in Canada showed that more people in our closest neighbors and the one country that knows us better than any other, viewed the United States as a bigger threat to world peace than Iraq.

In short, everything that the chickenhawks had predicted about a rosy outcome for the Iraq war proved false. This was made much worse by the fact that WMD's were never even found in Iraq, despite a massive search before and especially after the American invasion.

Yet, despite this overall travesty, there are still people out there who are unapologetic, and feel that this was absolutely the right call to make. When it was suggested in a recent news story that American troops had contracted illnesses from actual WMD's that were buried in the sands all across Iraq, and that there was a huge cover-up by the American government of this fact, so that those troops were misdiagnosed and did not get the proper treatment that they needed, certain people only saw opportunity in this story: it vindicated George W. Bush, because now, WMD's had been discovered in Iraq.

Never mind the shameful treatment of American troops. Now, they were proudly boasting that, indeed, Bush and his supporters had been right about Iraq, and the fiasco of the invasion had indeed been justified.

Except it wasn't, because they overlooked one simple fact: those WMD's had been built in the 1980's and 1990's, and were already known to exist even before the first war against Saddam's Iraq.

In other words, they did not prove at all that Saddam was building a mass arsenal in between the two wars against Iraq.

Here is a quote from an article on the subject by Adriana Scott that pretty much sums it all up:


"Just as swiftly as right-wing supporters celebrated the find, liberal critics were quick to point out that Chivers never said the bombs were the same WMDs that Bush described; they were from the 1980s and early 1990s."


So, even when WMD's are finally found in Iraq, it underscores exactly the extent to which this war was criminal, and further undermines the actual case for the war that the Bush administration and it's supporters (particularly FOX News) made to begin with!

Will wonders never cease?

Here is a link to this story:




Do Reports of WMD Found in Iraq Vindicate George W. Bush?  By Adriana Scott Oct. 16, 2014:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/10/16/new-york-times-reports-wmd-found-in-Iraq