KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW NOW . . .

 

 Ann Coulter   . . . "Indeed, after Bush's State of the Union address laying out the case for war with Iraq, The New York Times complained that he had given too many reasons: "Even the rationale for war seems to change from day to day. Mr. Bush ticked off a litany of accusations against Iraq in his State of the Union address ..." (New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003)

"Among the reasons we invaded Iraq were:

(1) Saddam had given shelter to terrorists who killed Americans. After 9/11, it was time for him to pay the price:
-- The mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking, Abu Abbas, who murdered a wheelchair-bound American citizen, Leon Klinghoffer, then forced the passengers to throw his body overboard, was living happily in Iraq. (Captured by U.S. forces in Baghdad less than a month after our invasion.)

-- The terrorist who orchestrated the murder of American diplomat Laurence Foley in October 2002, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also took refuge in Saddam's Iraq. (Killed by U.S. forces in Iraq on June 7, 2006.)

-- The one terrorist behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who got away, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Iraq, where he was given money and lived without fear of being extradited to the United States. (Whereabouts unknown. Possibly being groomed for a prime-time show on MSNBC.)

-- Czech intelligence reported that Mohammed Atta, 9/11 mastermind, met with Iraqi agents in Prague shortly before the attack.

(2) Saddam had attempted to assassinate a former president of the United States. Liberals complained that it was a family feud because that president happened to be Bush's father, but, again, he was also a FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. (Does being a relative of the president make you fair game for assassination attempts? Bill Clinton, please pick up the white courtesy phone.)

(3) Saddam not only had WMDs, he had used them -- far more prodigiously than Syria's Bashar al-Assad did when Obama masterfully backed down from his "red line" threat if Assad ever used chemical weapons. (Assad's WMDs killed about a thousand civilians -- 350 according to French intelligence, which is a lot better than ours. Saddam's WMDs killed an estimated 100,000 civilians. That's according to everyone -- the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Clinton-era ambassador Peter Galbraith.)

(4) We needed to smash some Muslim strongman after the 9/11 attack, and Saddam was as good as any other -- at least as good as the Taliban primitives who had allowed Osama bin Laden to pitch his tent in their godforsaken country.

It worked: Moammar Gadhafi, terrified that Bush would attack Libya next, invited U.N. inspectors in, gave up his WMDs, and paid the families of his Lockerbie bombing victims $8 million apiece.

(5) Saddam had committed atrocities on a far greater scale than our current bogeyman, ISIS. He tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqis -- removing their teeth with pliers, applying electric shocks to men's genitals, drilling holes in their ankles and forcing them to watch as their wives were raped -- as reported by USA Today, among others. There was no risk that we were accidentally taking out the Arab George Washington.

(6) Saddam was a dangerous and disruptive force in a crucial oil-producing region of the world. We need oil. Why not go to war for oil?

(7) The Iraqi people were a relatively sane, civilized and educated populace with a monstrous ruler. Removing that leader would provide a golden opportunity for an actual functioning Arab democracy -- an Arab Israel.
. . .

 

"Kelly asked Bush: "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?"

"The correct answer is:

Now that we know that a half-century of Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act would result in a country where a man like Barack Obama could be elected president, and then, purely out of antipathy to America, would withdraw every last troop from Iraq, nullifying America's victory and plunging the entire region into chaos, no, I would not bother removing dangerous despots in order to make America safer.

Instead, I would dedicate myself to overturning our immigration laws, ending the anchor-baby scam and building a triple-layer fence on the border, so that some future Republican president could invade Iraq without worrying about a foreign-elected president like Obama coming in and giving it away.

 Coulter's full article here. 
  All emphases added by TD