Was George W. Bush’s Decision to Invade Iraq Correct

T. Belman. I accept that Hussein had WMD and I reject the mantra of the left, “Bush lied, people died”. But that doesn’t mean that it was not a mistake to invade Iraq. Iraq was no threat to the US. Nor was it supporting terrorism outside its borders other than in the territories. The problem was that the US had to have a proper response to the 9/11 attack. Certainly taking down the Taliban was one. The US should have also invaded Iran to bring about a regime change and to thereby quash Islamism.

Yes Trump is a liberal in many ways but Is Trump a true Conservative? The answer may surprise you.

NBC Poll: Ted Cruz Takes National Lead, Donald Trump Slumps

By Gene Schwimmer, AMERICAN THINKER

Surely, to all but Donald Trump’s ardent supporters – which, sadly, probably is all of them – there can be no doubt, after Saturday’s Republican debate, that except on the sole issue of immigration, Trump is a Democrat.  Space and the need to stay on point preclude listing all of the Democratic talking points Trump parroted in South Carolina, so this essay focuses on the most egregious one – the “Bush lied, people died” libel – and on Trump’s view, unfortunately shared by many Republicans, that, the Iraq war was, in Trump’s words, a “big mistake” and that “we got nothing out of it.”

First, as Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff writes, there is no evidence that Trump opposed the Iraq pre-invasion (emphases added):

Last night, Donald Trump repeated his claim that “I’m the only one on the stage that said we should not go into Iraq.”  As I’ve pointed out before, however, there is no credible evidence that Trump said any such thing.

Trump voiced public opposition to the war for the first time… in the summer of 2004… [by which time] he was following a fairly large pack.

[O]pposing our actions in Iraq once they went pear-shaped is just Monday morning quarterbacking — a Trump specialty.

Second, the Democrats’ (and Trump’s, but the writer repeats himself) accusation that Bush ordered the Iraq invasion knowing that there were no WMD is flat-out false.  In fact, Bush was skeptical until then-CIA director George Tenet assured Bush that, based on CIA intelligence, Saddam’s possession of WMD was “a slam dunk.”

As to Trump’s criticism that Bush “failed to prevent 9/11” (and was therefore responsible for 9/11?), here is Tenet again (emphasis added):

As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate:  Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape.

This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton’s CIA director…

Mr. Tenet wrote in his memoirs… that Mr. Clinton left Mr. Bush with a CIA that was in “Chapter 11.”  The eavesdropping National Security Agency was “crumbling” and “going deaf,” he said.

Third, though the facts came out only years later, the world now knows that Tenet – and Bush – had it right.  There were, in fact, WMD in Iraq, as unclassified documents released by WikiLeaks in 2010 show.  As Larry Elder wrote at the time (emphases added):

Bush claimed that Iraq sought uranium, specifically “yellowcake[,]” “the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment” [that] can be enriched for use in… nuclear weapons…”

[…]

Wired Magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman… researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October [2010 and found]….  WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction[.]

[…]

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq – on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels – what even The  Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”:  550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake.  The New York Sun editorialized: “[B]ecause Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam… would have been too big a risk.

A risk that invading Iraq and toppling Saddam averted.  And on October 14, 2004, The New York Times reported (emphases added):

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq,… [f]rom 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs[.]

In fairness, the Times characterized the buried WMD as remnants of a “long abandoned program.”  Nevertheless, the chemical weapons were there and were, as the injuries to the soldiers in the article attest, still effective – and, presumably, potentially available for discovery, unearthing, and use, had we not uncovered and removed them before the jihadis could.  Ditto for the additional chemical weapons the CIA bought and destroyed (emphases added):

The Central Intelligence Agency… repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups[.] …

Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success.  It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

As for “what we got” from the Iraq war, we got, between the time Bush left office and President Obama squandered our hard won victory, a stable Iraq.

And make no mistake: Iraq would not have been stable when Bush left office had we not invaded and would still be stable today had Obama not pulled out.  The fallacy of those who call the Iraq war a mistake is their own erroneous belief that Saddam Hussein had Iraq’s disgruntled and restive population firmly under control and that the situation would not, could not, change.

Proof of the folly of that view can be found right next door, in Syria.

Like his father Hafez and like Saddam Hussein, Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless and brutal dictator.  Saddam Hussein headed the fascist Ba’ath Party in Iraq; Bashar Assad heads the Ba’ath Party in Syria.  Saddam was a minority (Sunni) dictator ruling a majority Shiite population; Assad is a minority (Alawite) dictator ruling a majority Sunni population.

Given these similarities between Bashar Assad and Saddam Hussein and the socioeconomic and sociopolitical situations in their respective countries, on what basis does one posit that the flames of the so-called Arab Spring, which began when a Tunisian fruit seller set himself afire after a municipal inspector confiscated his cart and quickly spread to Egypt; Libya; Yemen; and, yes, Syria, would somehow bypass Iraq?

There is no reason not to believe, and every reason to believe, that, had we not gone into Iraq, everything that is happening today in Syria, would be happening in Iraq, too.  No reason to believe that had we not invaded Iraq and destroyed the WMD that we incontestably know were there, these would not have fallen into jihadist hands in a post-Saddam Iraq.

For those who disagree: wanna bet a chemical attack inside Grand Central Station or Times Square (which doesn’t need New Year’s Eve, when police are out in force, to draw a crowd) on that?

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein gave us a stable Iraq that would still be stable had Barack Obama not cut and run.  It denied jihadists a fertile recruiting and training ground, not to mention a cache of deadly chemical weapons.  It also nipped a nascent nuclear program, sparing us the doubly sordid spectacle of Barack Obama and John Kerry giving away the store to two hostile countries on the verge of developing a nuclear capability.

And it gave us an ideal staging area, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and associated materiel already in place, from which to invade Iran, remove the mad mullahs, and destroy the Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities along with them, a mission that – and this is the real lesson of the Iraq War – our experience in Iraq taught us could have been accomplished in three weeks.

One of George W. Bush’s most positive personality traits is that he is humble.  One of his most negative traits is that he is, sometimes, too humble.  An arrogant president, such as the one we’re stuck with for another ten months, would have shouted his vindication from the rooftops.  Sadly, George W. Bush has chosen silence.  But that neither excuses nor forgives his detractors, including,especially including, the pseudo-Republican Donald Trump, who, onstage at a Republican debate, shamelessly parroted the Democratic “Bush lied, people died” meme.

And it especially does not justify a red-faced, bloviating cry-bully telling our Iraq veterans and the parents of all too many who did not return, at a Republican debate, that the soldiers who fought and died there fought and died in vain – at least, before Barack Obama took the Oath of Office.

Bush did not lie, and his decision to invade Iraq was right.  Hell, it was prescient.

Gene Schwimmer is a New York licensed real estate broker and the author of The Christian State.  Impress your friends and get invited to all the best parties by following Gene Schwimmer on Twitter.

Surely, to all but Donald Trump’s ardent supporters – which, sadly, probably is all of them – there can be no doubt, after Saturday’s Republican debate, that except on the sole issue of immigration, Trump is a Democrat.  Space and the need to stay on point preclude listing all of the Democratic talking points Trump parroted in South Carolina, so this essay focuses on the most egregious one – the “Bush lied, people died” libel – and on Trump’s view, unfortunately shared by many Republicans, that, the Iraq war was, in Trump’s words, a “big mistake” and that “we got nothing out of it.”

First, as Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff writes, there is no evidence that Trump opposed the Iraq pre-invasion (emphases added):

Last night, Donald Trump repeated his claim that “I’m the only one on the stage that said we should not go into Iraq.”  As I’ve pointed out before, however, there is no credible evidence that Trump said any such thing.

Trump voiced public opposition to the war for the first time… in the summer of 2004… [by which time] he was following a fairly large pack.

[O]pposing our actions in Iraq once they went pear-shaped is just Monday morning quarterbacking — a Trump specialty.

Second, the Democrats’ (and Trump’s, but the writer repeats himself) accusation that Bush ordered the Iraq invasion knowing that there were no WMD is flat-out false.  In fact, Bush was skeptical until then-CIA director George Tenet assured Bush that, based on CIA intelligence, Saddam’s possession of WMD was “a slam dunk.”

As to Trump’s criticism that Bush “failed to prevent 9/11” (and was therefore responsible for 9/11?), here is Tenet again (emphasis added):

As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate:  Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape.

This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton’s CIA director…

Mr. Tenet wrote in his memoirs… that Mr. Clinton left Mr. Bush with a CIA that was in “Chapter 11.”  The eavesdropping National Security Agency was “crumbling” and “going deaf,” he said.

Third, though the facts came out only years later, the world now knows that Tenet – and Bush – had it right.  There were, in fact, WMD in Iraq, as unclassified documents released by WikiLeaks in 2010 show.  As Larry Elder wrote at the time (emphases added):

Bush claimed that Iraq sought uranium, specifically “yellowcake[,]” “the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment” [that] can be enriched for use in… nuclear weapons…”

[…]

Wired Magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman… researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October [2010 and found]….  WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction[.]

[…]

In 2008, our military shipped out of Iraq – on 37 flights in 3,500 barrels – what even The  Associated Press called “the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program”:  550 metric tons of the supposedly nonexistent yellowcake.  The New York Sun editorialized: “[B]ecause Iraq, sitting on vast oil reserves, has no peaceful need for nuclear power. … To leave this nuclear material sitting around the Middle East in the hands of Saddam… would have been too big a risk.

A risk that invading Iraq and toppling Saddam averted.  And on October 14, 2004, The New York Times reported (emphases added):

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq,… [f]rom 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs[.]

In fairness, the Times characterized the buried WMD as remnants of a “long abandoned program.”  Nevertheless, the chemical weapons were there and were, as the injuries to the soldiers in the article attest, still effective – and, presumably, potentially available for discovery, unearthing, and use, had we not uncovered and removed them before the jihadis could.  Ditto for the additional chemical weapons the CIA bought and destroyed (emphases added):

The Central Intelligence Agency… repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups[.] …

Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success.  It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

As for “what we got” from the Iraq war, we got, between the time Bush left office and President Obama squandered our hard won victory, a stable Iraq.

And make no mistake: Iraq would not have been stable when Bush left office had we not invaded and would still be stable today had Obama not pulled out.  The fallacy of those who call the Iraq war a mistake is their own erroneous belief that Saddam Hussein had Iraq’s disgruntled and restive population firmly under control and that the situation would not, could not, change.

Proof of the folly of that view can be found right next door, in Syria.

Like his father Hafez and like Saddam Hussein, Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad is a ruthless and brutal dictator.  Saddam Hussein headed the fascist Ba’ath Party in Iraq; Bashar Assad heads the Ba’ath Party in Syria.  Saddam was a minority (Sunni) dictator ruling a majority Shiite population; Assad is a minority (Alawite) dictator ruling a majority Sunni population.

Given these similarities between Bashar Assad and Saddam Hussein and the socioeconomic and sociopolitical situations in their respective countries, on what basis does one posit that the flames of the so-called Arab Spring, which began when a Tunisian fruit seller set himself afire after a municipal inspector confiscated his cart and quickly spread to Egypt; Libya; Yemen; and, yes, Syria, would somehow bypass Iraq?

There is no reason not to believe, and every reason to believe, that, had we not gone into Iraq, everything that is happening today in Syria, would be happening in Iraq, too.  No reason to believe that had we not invaded Iraq and destroyed the WMD that we incontestably know were there, these would not have fallen into jihadist hands in a post-Saddam Iraq.

For those who disagree: wanna bet a chemical attack inside Grand Central Station or Times Square (which doesn’t need New Year’s Eve, when police are out in force, to draw a crowd) on that?

Invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein gave us a stable Iraq that would still be stable had Barack Obama not cut and run.  It denied jihadists a fertile recruiting and training ground, not to mention a cache of deadly chemical weapons.  It also nipped a nascent nuclear program, sparing us the doubly sordid spectacle of Barack Obama and John Kerry giving away the store to two hostile countries on the verge of developing a nuclear capability.

And it gave us an ideal staging area, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and associated materiel already in place, from which to invade Iran, remove the mad mullahs, and destroy the Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities along with them, a mission that – and this is the real lesson of the Iraq War – our experience in Iraq taught us could have been accomplished in three weeks.

One of George W. Bush’s most positive personality traits is that he is humble.  One of his most negative traits is that he is, sometimes, too humble.  An arrogant president, such as the one we’re stuck with for another ten months, would have shouted his vindication from the rooftops.  Sadly, George W. Bush has chosen silence.  But that neither excuses nor forgives his detractors, including,especially including, the pseudo-Republican Donald Trump, who, onstage at a Republican debate, shamelessly parroted the Democratic “Bush lied, people died” meme.

And it especially does not justify a red-faced, bloviating cry-bully telling our Iraq veterans and the parents of all too many who did not return, at a Republican debate, that the soldiers who fought and died there fought and died in vain – at least, before Barack Obama took the Oath of Office.

Bush did not lie, and his decision to invade Iraq was right.  Hell, it was prescient.

Gene Schwimmer is a New York licensed real estate broker and the author of The Christian State.  Impress your friends and get invited to all the best parties by following Gene Schwimmer on Twitter.

February 18, 2016 | 5 Comments »

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5 Comments / 5 Comments

  1. Paddy Said:

    1. Don’t set up the phony Kuwait War under Herbert Walker Bush.
    2. Because of #1, 911 doesn’t happen.

    If we didn’t nuke Hiroshima, one million American soldiers would have died in the first wave and it is dubious if the first invasion would have been a success according to some frightening recalculating hindsight,
    .
    Youse pacifists that want to re-write history, don’t get it, The enemy is the enemy and Islam is the enemy and they are coming for us no matter what. Modern technology has opened up the world for them. Yeah maybe no 9-11 , instead maybe Year Zero at 2000 when a super-powerful Saddam with nuclear reactors would have smuggled nukes into America and blown up five cities at one time.
    Sure treat terrorists with kindness, it’s the prevailing politically correct sentiment in Canada – they will knife your guts in return every time.

  2. The death of any dictator is not a sad thing. I don’t care if they lied, though they didn’t.
    Taking down a guy with billions of oil wealth , doing everything he can to get WMD? What’s the problem?
    And what is the problem with us having the oil instead of the Muslims?
    Have youse guys forgotten the scuds that fell on Israel? Just lucky the payloads were blown up by US jets.
    The only problem with Iraq is that Obama the Jihadist enabler LEFT.
    The war is on and always has been on. It’s us or them. We need to invade and STAY. It’s not over til it’s over, rover.
    And it’s mt over til the Fat Islam sings no more.
    Iraq has been a picnic so far compared to what is coming next and what has always been coming no mater what.
    Iraq was good to hone our weapons for the coming fight.
    The Isalm-apocalpse started a long time ago. If nothing is happening they are just regrouping.
    Hit them everywhere we can, hit them hard and never stop until Islam is subjugated – they only respect subjugation – it’s in the Koran.
    Never turn down an opportunity to destroy and occupy a Muslim nation – never stop and never leave – consolidate and expand the victory never withdraw.
    Te USA today riddled with Jihadists both combatant arm and cultural, Europe has fallen, Iraq didn’t do that – Islam and the lib-left traitors did.
    Fight to win, not to lose. Islam is prepared to fight and die for conquest, America must atch them will for will.

  3. It’s really simple. After 9-11, we had to demonstrate that not only was our military able to defeat any foe, but that we had the will to use that military. Which terror-supporting Muslim country we picked was secondary. Iraq was a habitual violator of sanctions, and a threat to its neighbors.

    Where the U.S. went wrong was after defeating the Iraqi army. Rather than spending U.S. money to rebuild Iraq and win hearts and minds, the correct next step should have been to tell Iraq that the U.S. is establishing a permanent base in Basra, and will anchor a fleet in the gulf. Iraq must use its own resources to rebuild itself. If it does not harbor jihadists, or threaten other nations, there will be peace. If, however, Iraq insists on being belligerent, we will once again invade and destroy Iraq’s infrastucture. And we will do this as often as neccessary. Then we’d have to back up that threat with action. I bet if we had done that, the Middle East, including Iran, would be quiet and passive today.