#8 Perfesser, in the final months before the Iraq invasion we watched the trucks convoy from Iraq to Syria and then the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Some of those trucks came from Baghdad and were carrying a major portion of Saddam's billions to Syrian banks; and some of those trucks were carrying the household goods of his government-in-exile, which settled in Damascus to handle logistics and disbursement for the "insurgents" Saddam was convinced would drive us weak-willed Americans from his country post-haste. But the majority of it was his WMD stuff; the remainder of which was destroyed in situ in the early days of the invasion -- remember those sterilized portable labs that were found early on? and reports recently that, during the invasion, units of Republican Guards had gone into storage depots to destroy the contents?
President Bush is a typical MBA guy. Every act ideally fulfills multiple needs. In the case of Iraq, it looks like this:
o We need a base centrally located in the Middle East, from which to be able to strike outward militarily, as needed. And it mustn't be Israel, which is already on our side, is too small for the size and number of bases needed, and would not teach the Arab world the necessary lesson, nor Saudi Arabia, where we already were, which was proving more amenable to hosting Islamofascist terrorists than American protectors.
o We need to close down funding and training support of Islamist terrorists. The major funders of terror are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.
o We need to stop the research and production of WMD by irresponsible parties. Those parties would be North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Libya.
o The 9/11 attacks were understood by Osama bin Laden and the Muslim World as theater -- showing that Islam can successfully attack the very heart of the West, the attack which was to draw Allah Himself into the decades long war of Islam against the West. There were reports at the time that bin Laden spent 9/11 glued to CNN in his Afghan compound, very surprised that his attacks wrought so much damage -- he'd apparently expected no more than a dramatic fire and a few hundred deaths. His father may have been the construction worker of the House of Saud, but Dad's lad Osama had spent his youth studing the Koran.
o Bush needed a rapid military conquest to dishearten the rest of the region, and trigger change. Maintaining the status quo had clearly not resulted in decreasing the use of terror and terrorists in the region, nor in reducing the level of taught hatred for the West, Israel and the Jews, and the Western liberal ideas of freedom of thought, of speech, of individual responsibility, etc.
o The entire world is hooked on oil, not just the U.S. Saddam Hussein was already talking of cutting off supply or controlling it. He had invaded Kuwait not just because Iraq had always considered Kuwait to have been territory stolen by Britain, but as a first step to controlling the world by conquering the oil fields. Bush pere launched Desert Storm at the request of the Saudis, terrified that Saddam Hussein would make good on his rhetoric by attacking them next. And American troops remained in Saudi Arabi afterward, also at the request of the princelings, in order to protect them from Iraqi revenge.
o Finally, Iraq was low hanging fruit, as they say. The first invasion, the one at the behest of the UN, had been ended only by a truce, not a peace treaty; and from the moment of signing, Saddam Hussein violated the terms, up to and including suborning the UN itself, and bribing the majority of the members of the Security Council (as you'll recall, France, Germany and Russia were the major recipients of Oil for Food contracts ... and kickbacks).
There was a lot of argument here at Rantburg before and after the invasion that Iran should have been chosen the recipient of Bush's martial embrace instead. The arguments being that Iran finances and supports terror, too (Hizb'Allah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad as proxies for its war on Israel), is a force for instability in the region (eg its war with Iraq, which first brought Saddam Hussein to the world's attention), and its youth, making up about half of its population, mostly loathe their religious masters and love America and the West, making them better hosts for a long term American military presence. In the end, though, low-hanging fruit and imminence won out (I don't think at that point we knew much about the scope of Iran's nuclear ambitions, and would have been hard pressed to make convincing arguments thereupon to an audience predisposed to be highly skeptical about anything coming from George Bush's mouth).
Or so I understand it. ;-) |
Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.