quote:

ORIGINAL: Owner59

The "WMD" the bushies were trying to scare folks with were nuclear weapons,which never existed.There was no threat to the US by Iraqi chemical weapons,even if they existed,which they didn`t.

IMO,the real reason was for invading was saddam was about to have the decades long sanctions/no-fly-zone/world scrutiny lefted.

They sould have just tweaked the UN into keeping the sanctions in place and saddam would have continued to be the zero threat that he was already.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Ninebelowzero

Serious question to all you USA chaps. If the Bush administration didn't invade Iraq because of WMD's then what was the real reason. I happen to think they were shitting bullets over the risk of them falling into terrorists hands & hit the panic button. I'm interested in your take not jerking you all off.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DarkSteven

Good question.  I doubt there was a single reason.

1. Bantha Samantha's theory above is a commonly cited one.  Like a domino theory in reverse: once we established a stable Democratic government in the region, the Arab fiefdoms would topple and we'd be left with an all-Democratic region of popularly elected governments.
2. There's a theory that he was competing with his father and wanted to brag that he'd taken out Saddam when his father was too timid.
3. This is somewhat thin but Cheney has insisted to this day that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11 although nobody else will back him up.
4. It's entirely possible that some of the Bushies were convinced that there actually WERE WMDs.  I doubt that Powell would have made the UN speech if he himself wasn't convinced, and he couldn't have been the only one.
5. As tj444 stated, oil.  But not as in GETTING the oil, rather rewarding the oil COMPANIES.  Along the military-industrial complex conspiracy theories, note that Cheney's ex-company Halliburton got no-bid contracts to manage the occupation. A lot of very dirty money got made in Iraq.

This isn't exactly a reason, but the lack of a reason against - it's pretty evident that the invasion proponents ignored all the analysis of what would happen and drastically minimized the human and political damage that resulted from the invasion.  Clear lack of caution.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Jim Lobe Inter Press Service's correspondent in Washington, DC.

US Takes Custody of Another Wayward Client

by Jim Lobe
by Jim Lobe

At last in U.S. military captivity, ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics.

His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also recall long-forgotten memories – or memories best forgotten – of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.

If so, he will remember that he was in Baghdad, as a special envoy from then-president Ronald Reagan, assuring his host that, to quote the secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) that served as his talking points: the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West."

So began the effective resumption of close relations between Baghdad and Washington that had been cut off by Iraq during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Within a year, Washington would fully normalize ties with Saddam and even suggest that the dictator had become a full-fledged "Arab moderate," ready to make peace with Israel.

Of course, the reason for this rapprochement – nay, avid courtship – was the bad turn that the war between Iraq and Iran had taken for Baghdad. A victory by Teheran, which seemed imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.

It was a question of the lesser of two evils, as explained succinctly by Howard Teicher, who worked on Iraq as a member of Reagan's National Security Council (NSC). "You have to understand the geo-strategic context, which was very different from where are now," he told the Washington Post earlier this year.

"Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."

It was presumably realpolitik that also persuaded Rumsfeld not to bring up Iraq's use of chemical weapons with Hussein in their first meeting Dec. 20, 1983, even though the administration knew about it.

(After long insisting that he did raise the issue with Hussein, the recent release of State Department memoranda obtained by the National Security Archive has forced Rumsfeld to change his story. He did mention the issue, among many others, when he met with then-foreign minister Tariq Aziz separately.)

For the next five years, Washington would quietly ensure that Saddam got all the military equipment he needed to stave off defeat, even precursor chemicals that could be used against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians.

Not that Washington supported the use of chemical weapons, particularly against civilians. It was more that the Reagan administration was very reluctant to condemn their use by Iraq back then.

How much more of this intimate relationship Saddam will recall when he gets a public forum is undoubtedly a concern of many current and past administration figures.

The situation echoes the worries of former US president George H.W. Bush over what Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega might say in open court about his long and intimate connections to US intelligence agencies when he surrendered to the U.S. military after Washington's invasion of Panama in 1989.

Of course, Noriega was recruited while he was still in the military academy, and his rise to power was facilitated tremendously by those ties.

He was a paid agent from the beginning, and, while a rogue who did not hesitate to intimidate and occasionally knock off a few dissidents to keep things quiet, he was never the mass murderer and serial invader of his neighbors that Saddam has been.

On the other hand, Saddam was also a beneficiary of the CIA's help – even if he did not get the kind of sustained attention that Noriega received – and long before Rumsfeld's visit at that.

According to an investigative report by Richard Sale of United Press International (UPI) published last April, Saddam's first contacts date back to 1959, when the CIA backed an assassination attempt in which he took part against then Iraqi prime minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim, the man who overthrew the western-backed monarchy the year before.

At the time, Iraq – as in 1982 – was seen as a key strategic asset, and Qasim's decision to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact and subsequently get cozy with Moscow was seen by Washington as a potentially disastrous setback.

Saddam, an aspiring young Ba'athist tough, was handled on behalf of the CIA by a local agent and an Egyptian military attaché, who set him up in an apartment opposite Qasim's office, according to Adel Darwish, author of Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War, in an account backed up to UPI by U.S. officials.

The specific hit, however, was botched when Saddam "lost his nerve," according

quote:

ORIGINAL: Ninebelowzero

But when I saw Gen Powell before the UN he was specific about chemical & bio weapons. Eventhat snake oil salesman Blair never mentioned nukes.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Owner59

The "WMD" the bushies were trying to scare folks with were nuclear weapons,which never existed.There was no threat to the US by Iraqi chemical weapons,even if they existed,which they didn`t.

IMO,the real reason was for invading was saddam was about to have the decades long sanctions/no-fly-zone/world scrutiny lefted.

They sould have just tweaked the UN into keeping the sanctions in place and saddam would have continued to be the zero threat that he was already.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DarkSteven

As a defense to the Bush administration, there have been indications that Saddam's scientists may have misrepresented to him Iraq's nuclear capability.  The Bushies might have over-relied on Saddam's beliefs and under-relied on the physical evidence.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Ninebelowzero

As I understand it Bush's pre election foreign policy could be written on the back of a postage stamp with room for the bill of rights left over. he wanted to focus on domestic & stop the USA acting as global policemen after Clinton's reckless adventurism around the globe.