[The Urban Sombrero]

Sorry 64, I didn't mean to neglect you. :biggrin:


EXCERPT----
"Joe Biden and John Kerry, both senators at the time, supported the measure. (THE IRAQ WAR RESOLUTION 2002) Mrs. Clinton’s New York colleague Charles Schumer said yes. So did Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California. Heck, even Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada voted for the resolution.

The day before the vote, Mrs. Clinton delivered a passionate — and lengthy — speech in support of the war bill.
“I believe the facts that have brought us to this fateful vote are not in doubt,” she said on the Senate floor. “Saddam Hussein is a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family members, to maintain his iron grip on power. He used chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20,000 people.”

She laid out a detailed case for why America needed to step in, singing the praises of George W. Bush’s father. “In 1991, Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait, losing the support of the United States. The first President Bush assembled a global coalition, including many Arab states, and threw Saddam out after 43 days of bombing and a hundred hours of ground operations.”

She pointed out that after that war, “the United Nations imposed a number of requirements on Iraq, among them disarmament of all weapons of mass destruction, stocks used to make such weapons, and laboratories necessary to do the work.” And she noted that everyone knew Saddam had WMDs: “The [U.N.] inspectors found and destroyed far more weapons of mass destruction capability than were destroyed in the Gulf War, including thousands of chemical weapons, large volumes of chemical and biological stocks, a number of missiles and warheads, a major lab equipped to produce anthrax and other bioweapons, as well as substantial nuclear facilities.”

She expressed support for her husband’s decision in 1998 to push for “regime change,” and ripped the U.N. for putting limits on its inspections. And she went on and on about Saddam’s WMD stockpile, saying he held so many secret sites that “were huge compounds well-suited to hold weapons labs, stocks.”

Mrs. Clinton declared that Saddam, “left unchecked … will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.”

But perhaps she didn’t fully believe the intelligence, the top-secret briefings. Wait, she did: “Now this much is undisputed.” Undisputed. Saddam had WMDs, had used them against his own people, was a serious threat to the world. Or so she said."
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015.../?page=all

In the lead up to war, it became McNamara's "fog of war." Nobody would argue that Sadaam Hussein was a good dude...he was a despot. But, any war drawing upon national passion right after 9/11 that plied those emotions and sentiments to go after Sadaam? It became a hodge-podge of flawed intelligence, stir- the-pot rhetoric, and rush to battle, where any politician who shouted "hold the phone" got to wear the wussy dove hat. In my view, the invasion of Iraq will be viewed historically as a horribly flawed decision, made on dubious grounds, which resulted in chaos writ large. Celebrated cases make for bad law, and 9/11 led this nation into many shock and fear induced errors of policy and judgment, errors not confined to red or blue suits. However, those days were difficult ones, and historians have the luxury of hindsight.