@MentORPHEUS

@TheRedPike

At the time most of the world agreed with the "righteous moral stature" of it.

Only those who took the Official Party Line at face value, and lacked the will to study the matter even a little bit. That time, the Administration and media mouthpieces were unanimous and insistent on the "fact" that "Saddam has WMDs.

You're conflating the first and second again.

The first was in 1991, and was purely to protect Saudi Arabia and then liberate Kuwait.

In fact, the first Pres Bush faced a lot of criticism from both sides of the aisle for not invading Iraq and taking Saddam out! However, we had no standing at the time to do that, and doing so would likely have turned our coalition against us.

That time, the Administration and media mouthpieces were unanimous and insistent on the "fact" that "Saddam has WMDs.

Sigh, time to go around that mountain again.

He more than likely had them, but those huge truck convoys going into Syria while our government spent months discussing and debating got rid of much of what he had.

Where do you think Al-Assad got the chemical weapons he used on Syrian rebels during the Arab Spring?

@deeplydisturbed

“WMD” is among the biggest payola *psyops [I hate my phone too lol] in modern human history. They didn’t even waste time pulling a false flag. Just point and accuse.

And from @Vermillion-Rx:

Imagine if George W Bitch just abducted Saddam Hussein over night instead of fucking us over

I really don't like going around this mountain again, so I won't. If anyone is remotely interested in what I have to say about Saddam and WMDs, feel free to knock yourselves out here.

bottom line: even if he never had WMDs (and he did), his kicking out the inspectors meant hostilities resumed.

Additionally, Saddam had multiple body doubles scattered throughout Iraq to fool would-be assassins. That, and he had an entire political party that was fiercely loyal to him. The invasion was necessary (though poorly planned past it).

@MentORPHEUS

There DID exist alternatives to the United States taking charge of actively invading Iraq. Since America (supposedly) had the agreement and support of virtually all the militarized and significant world trading countries of the western world, physically and economically blockading and isolating Iraq stood as the most obvious of these. How long do you think it would have taken for this to make internal affairs miserable enough that his own people stopped following and deposed Saddam? This could have cost virtually no soldiers' lives, and very little in the way of ordnance and other costly war expendables.

This is even more extreme than bombing Iraq, from the angle of the perpetuation of American power. This is the very mistake that started Russia winding up to be able to resist this when they did many similar things to Iran. It signaled that the tools were in place to apply it to someone larger. This was a correct assessment by Putin's administration. That is the reason that it pretty much fizzled out against Russia during the course of this last year. This in physically softer than invasion, but it's a worse blow to American power than invasion. In fact, other places welcome this because it means that the superpower is on the way down.

I have another alternative for you. It's called underwear day. None of that was worth getting out of bed for. "Saddam Hussein is ....." means it's time to catch up on Netflix in my underwear, or even less. Just don't. Nothing. Saddam Hussein's military worth anything real had already been destroyed in 1990-1991. Fuck'em. Just don't do shit. Nothing. Let them move to trading in euros instead, and let the dollar sink.

That would have brought the hard economic reality home instead of the last twenty plus years of hallowing out America, and greatly reducing its lifespan. Just do nothing. Then collapse the dollar if needed, but do it 10-15 years sooner. Then rebuild instead of having another entire generation only knowing constant slow-motion collapse with some sugar highs.

"Saddam had WMDs" IS the normie position that was politically useful in selling the second Gulf War to the American public.

Here is an update to the topic of whether Saddam possessed WMDs during the time of the lead-up to the Second Gulf War. It features the world's BEST authority on the topic: Scott Ritter, the lead UN Weapons Inspector who actually went around Iraq inspecting former weapons sites at the time. In this clip, he and longtime media figure Judge Andrew Napolitano discuss high profile MSM figures getting fired and Judge Nap having his regular appearances on Bill O'Reilley's show cancelled for speaking out against the prevailing Party Line that "Saddam has WMDs."

Starts at the relevant time for about a 6 minute watch. I do recommend if you have time to watch the whole program that prior to this discusses Ukraine, and to check out Judge Napolitano's regular interviews with very senior military and intelligence figures for an authoritative alternative to the MSM point of view made not to inform but to manipulate public opinion.

youtu.be/B9jlwAEycjk?t=1564

@Lionsmane8

i did give an alternative:

Minding your own business.

Pointless interventions are just that, pointless.

It was our business, and it was the entire world's business that Saddam had violated the terms of his previous surrender. Kicking out the inspectors was an act of war, and hostilities should have resumed sooner because all the gum-flapping did was give him time to move his WMDs to Jordan and Syria.

Non-interventionism was practiced (at least by the US) prior to the two World Wars. It didn't go so well for the rest of the world.

If we had just allowed Saddam to continue on his path after kicking out the inspectors, it would only have been a matter of time before he conquered Kuwait again, and Saudi Arabia would have been next.

That would have been far worse for the world's stability than what took place, and all the people decrying our actions now would be decrying our lack of action because their only guiding principle is "hurr dee durr amurrca bad!"

@Typo-MAGAshiv

What happened to "muh dead brown babies"?

In the instance where you didn't put on your pants to go kill them. Well then someone else would have killed them instead, or not at all.

Where did this 180 from what you've previously said in this discussion come from?

I'm not the champion of all brown babies in the world. I was just pointing out that those who have killed so many of them should not be so harsh on a literal brown woman who killed who own brown child while under the spell of Satanists.

Had we allowed Saddam to steamroll the rest of the Middle East, you'd be kvetching "how could Americans just stand by and let this happen!"

That time before you when the US destroyed most of Saddam's gear as CNN anchors fake protected themselves from distant bombs had already done the trick. What you did was just a gay cleanup operation for Federal Reserve Jewish gangsters. That was where I was coming from when I said that you didn't actually collect any honor after passing Go, and are just a trumped up mercenary thug for a cartel.

@Whisper

The US federal government does not wage endless war in order to protect Americans, or make the world safe, or to defeat evil. It does so to justify the transfer of taxpayer dollars into private pockets.

Similar to what I said sometime last week or the week before, both of those can be true. Getting rid of Saddam in Iraq was necessary, as was getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as was getting rid of Al Qaeda and other terrorists in both countries.

Yes, some people profited from this.

That doesn't make the actions any less necessary, just that they could have been conducted in a more ethical manner. There were tons of things that could have been done better, more effectively, and more ethically, etc, but that doesn't render the entire operation "bad".

You don't get points for fixing a problem you created in the first place

A) assuming for a moment that these were problems we created in the first place, then hadn't we damned well better take responsibility for solving them? The knee-jerk "hurr dee durr amurrca bad" crowd would whinge and complain either way, of course.

B) we didn't create this problem. Islamists who actually follow the teachings of Muhammad from the Koran and the Hadith will always try to forcibly convert others, including through conquest and terrorism. Had we not funded the mujahadeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan, they'd have just added that to their list of grievances. These are not reasonable people. They only understand strength and violence.

Veterans have done nothing for me but cost me money and make third world Allahu Ackbars want to kill me

That's horseshit. Like I said above: they'd want to kill you no matter what.

FFS, these are people who try to kill their neighbors (as in, families in houses in close proximity to each other) over whose kid has more candy.

They want to kill anyone and everyone who isn't exactly like them.

Taking the fight to them kept most of it away from here. Every terrorist killed in Iraq or Afghanistan was one fewer who could sneak into a Western country and bomb a bus, a train, etc.

I think maybe we did too good a job keeping civilians safe, as a lot of you seem to think the entire world would be holding hands and singing "We Are The World" if it weren't for the mean old military. I promise you, the world is full of people who hate us just for existing. For every grievance they have that they make seem legit (or even the ones that are actually legit), if we solved it, they'd make up some other reason. You can see it in the conversations on this very website over the past few weeks. One moment I'm a baby killer just murdering random brown people, next moment it's "who cares how many people Saddam murdered". The only guiding principle being "hurr dee durr amurrca bad".