The man who all but convinced me Saddam no longer had any WMD and well before Bush's pre-emptive attack was former nuclear inspector Scott Ritter who reiterated time and again (and well before Bush's pre-emptive attack) there no longer was any WMD in Iraq. It had all been found and destroyed by Ritter and the other nuclear inspectors in the early 1990's after the conclusion of the first Gulf war.
Obviously Ritter was ignored and denounced by the Bush mob. They were determined to go to war even though their reasons were based on deceptions and lies.
There was Secretary of State Colin Powell's charade of a presentation given at the U.N. that past February 2003 (which later proved to be all falsehoods and destroyed the mans reputation as somebody who could be trusted and believed).
There were no stainless steel cylinders capable of enriching uranium. They were too small and used for conventional weapons.
There had been no "yellow cake" delivered to Saddam by Niger.
Saddam had no connection with Osama bin Laden and nothing to do with events of 9/11.
Subsequent revelations, particularly the "Downing Street Memo" showed beyond any doubt "intelligence and facts were fixed around policy" and laid bare the false reasoning for going to war were just trumped up lies.
All of V.P. Cheney's interviews with New York Times writers and his appearance on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert was all propaganda and lies intended to sell the idea that Saddam Hussein needed to be stopped and even if it took war to do it.
The "full court press" for invading Iraq began in January 2002 when the search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan was essentially ended and "morphed" into the need to go to war if necessary against Saddam Hussein if he didn't come clean and admit he had WMD. Bush's State of the Union address that January was the venue where he illogically combined Iraq, Iran and North Korea into the incongruous "axis of evil" presumably alluding to Hitler and Japan's axis alliance in W.W. II. But it was just a phrase cooked up by one of Bush's speech writers and had no basis in fact.
So the drumbeat for war on Saddam's Iraq became relentless throughout 2002 and into 2003 until Bush gave the order to invade on March 20, 2003.
Anniversaries are sometimes celebrations or harsh remembrances. Like December 7, 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, March 20,2003 will always be remembered as the worst foreign policy debacle that should never have happened. This supreme misadventure showed we had learned nothing in our war in Viet Nam, whose escalation was based on a phony Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened but got us deeper into the civil war in Viet Nam and the unnecessary loss of over 50,000 G.I.'s and hundred's of thousands Vietnamese massacred, raped, mutilated and murdered by our troops. President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in 1965 and President Richard Nixon continued and expanded the war into Cambodia while relentlessly bombing Hanoi and Haiphong with B52 bombers. We left Viet Nam in 1973 when the last American personnel were unceremoniously flown out by helicopter from the now abandoned American embassy.
Again the Iraq war should never have happened. It was the wet dream of neo conservatives Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl et al as well as Chaney and Don Rumsfeld. George W. Bush just went along with Chaney and was needed to sign the invasion order.
As for the neo conservatives, they envisioned Iraq as the beginning of remaking the Middle East under U.S. domination. It is they who still believe the Iraq war was good thing, so deluded and detached from reality as any group advising an American president.
Putting American troops in harm's way unnecessarily in Iraq was unforgiveable for which the Bush mob has never been held accountable; a complete travesty of injustice.
For this writer March 20 th being the 10 th anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq was executed by a group of war criminals and never brought to justice. A war crime that will live in infamy.
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