Saddam Hussein quietly celebrated on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists, using fuel-laden jetliners as weapons of mass destruction, laid waste to the World Trade Center and gouged a hole in the Pentagon.
The Iraqi dictator delighted in the mass murder of nearly 3,000 people in New York, in Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania. "The United States reaps the thorns its rulers have planted in the world," he spake.
Saddam was not responsible for the worst-ever terror attack on U.S. soil, as President Bush acknowledged more than a year ago. But he certainly derived vicarious satisfaction from the destruction of Sept. 11, from the carnage.
And his despotic regime, at the very least, tacitly encouraged more terror attacks upon the United States, as evidenced by a polemic, published in Al-Rafidayn, an Iraqi newspaper controlled by Saddam's government.
"If the attacks of September 11 cost the lives of 3,000 civilians," it pronounced "what would happen if hundreds of planes attacked American cities?"
Now, if Saddam's regime hinted at strikes against America before Sept. 11, 2001, then maybe those hints could have been dismissed as just so much bluster. But after Sept. 11, no hints, no bellicose statements could be taken unseriously.
That's why the overwhelming sentiment in Washington, from the White House to Capitol Hill, was that Saddam's regime represented a gathering threat to the security of the United States, to the safety of the American people.
And no two lawmakers were more convinced of Saddam's menace than Sens. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, and John Edwards, the North Carolina Democrat, who are now staking their bid for the White House on opposition to the war in Iraq.
In October 2002, Edwards stated, "Saddam Hussein's regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies. ... "We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. ...
We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons. And we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal."
In January 2003, Kerry declared, "We need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know his litany of offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. ...
And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction."
President Bush concurred with Sens. Edwards and Kerry. In fact, one year and one day after the terror attacks upon the United States, the president went to the United Nations and laid out a case for action against Saddam's regime.
The Security Council responded in November 2002 by unanimously approving Resolution 1441, which gave Saddam's regime "a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" or suffer the consequences.
Well, six months after Bush's U.N. speech, four months after the Security Council issued its ultimatum to Iraq, Saddam's defiance of the both the U.N. and the United States continued.
So what was Bush to do? Acquiesce to "allies" on the Security Council who wanted to give Saddam a final "final opportunity" to comply with resolutions he had defied for the previous 12 years? Or make good on his warning to bring regime change to Iraq if Saddam remained defiant?
Had the nation's commander in chief faced such a decision before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, maybe an argument could have been made for giving Saddam so many more months or years to get his mind right.
But after the mass murder of 3,000 people on American soil by Islamic extremists, the security of the United States, the safety of the American people demanded that the president take action against Saddam's recalcitrant regime, even without the blessing of the United Nations.
In testimony this week to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, told lawmakers that his team turned up no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction at the time President Bush took the nation to war with Iraq.
Duelfer's findings, included in a report of nearly 1,000 pages, have been seized upon by war critics, by Bush foes, as confirmation of their view that the war was unjustified, that the White House deliberately misled the American people about the threat posed by Saddam's regime.
But President Bush hardly was the only one in the nation's capitol persuaded by intelligence reports warning that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Sens. Kerry and Edwards were persuaded by the same reports, as their aforementioned statements indicated.
Moreover, while Duelfer's report states that there were no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq by the time U.S. forces invaded the country, he told lawmakers that inspectors cannot "definitively say whether or not WMD materials were transferred out of Iraq before the war."
He also stated that, "By 1993, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two."
The bottom line is that Saddam had the will and a way to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction. And it is conceivable that those weapons would have been used against either the United States or its allies, either by Saddam himself or by a terror organization operating as Saddam's proxy.
That's why the United States was right to go to war against Iraq, whether or not Saddam actually had a ready stockpile of WMDs.
For in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, this nation's leaders must be resolved to take whatever measures necessary including pre-emptive war to prevent another atrocity against the American people.
Wrinten by Joseph Perkins, this sums up exactly why the way in Iraq was needed. Want more Info I will be sure glad to get as much info that you could posibly desire.
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Topic: What Some Of The Us Military Realy Think. (Read 306 times)