Knowing what you now know...

Would you have authorized a war in Iraq?”  The news goons keep asking that question and our Republicans are finding it hard to answer because the public now seems to have concluded that the war was a mistake of some dimension and they don't want to risk popularity.  So I am looking for true leadership who could also make the goons with the gotcha question twist in the wind.  Here’s how I would answer it.

            Well, Mr. Reporter, as I remember there were three reasons given for why US should declare war on Iraq as eloquently stated by Sec. of State Powell.  So why don’t you list them and I will tell you what I think on each.  What?  You don’t recall the 3 points?  Well, let me refresh you.  In order of importance the first was the most vital.  We have declared a war on terror. Does Saddam Hussein train or harbor terrorists?  The answer to that was a resounding Yes.  Al Qaeda in Iraq was one of our most robust opponents.  Saddam had the only airliner fuselage used to train terrorists and had a long history of sponsoring terror, in fact, the most prevalent country in the world to sponsor terrorism.  So the first question gets a Yes.

            Second question was, Did Saddam terrorize his own people?  And the answer we had in 2002 was not quite right.  We said he had killed 100,000 of his own people and used nerve gas to kill Kurds.  Actually, what we know now is that he killed over 600,000.  So this question gets a second Yes.

            Third question: Did Saddam pose a threat with a stockpile of WMDs to the rest of civilization?  We thought so in 2002.  But what was revealed was a failed nuclear program that Iraqi scientists had kept secret from Saddam.  That is why he wouldn’t allow any international inspections—he thought he had a nuclear program.  Ironically he didn't. A report that was released last year by the Pentagon showed that we did indeed find weapons of mass destruction interspersed with standard weapons—6500 of them, in fact.  But US military kept this fact secret lest the opponents concentrate on capturing ammunition caches.  There was a disinformation campaign to say we had found no WMDs.  But even widespread interviews with soldiers, had let the cat out of the bag on this topic however, the partisan news media wasn’t interested in doing any investigative journalism because it didn’t fit the leftist mantra that there were no WMDs.  So the answer to the third question is Yes again.  (Although this remote threat was only of tertiary concern.)

            What we didn’t know in 2002 was that the Pussy Democrats would oppose and pull out of Iraq at the first cowardly opportunity.  After the war was won with Petraeus’s surge, Obama snubbed the Iraqi government in order to follow his Hands Up, Don’t Shoot foreign policy.  He has cut the US military by 1/3 in 6 years, shows a complete lack of resolve to solve anything in the Middle East and turns a blind eye to the genocide of Christians.  So as you can tell, I would probably favor authorizing action in Iraq, but with more nation building.  Nation-building of USA is what is needed in the worst way.