> Personally, I think our government honestly believed there were WMDs. I'm not so sure there weren't any, either, and Saddam just got them out in time. I'm not sold on that conclusion; it's just a thought.

Colin Powell, 24 February 2001:
"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq..."

Colin Powell, 15 May 2001:
"The sanctions, as they are called, have succeeded over the last 10 years, not in deterring him from moving in that direction, but from actually being able to move in that direction. The Iraqi regime militarily remains fairly weak. It doesn't have the capacity it had 10 or 12 years ago. It has been contained. And even though we have no doubt in our mind that the Iraqi regime is pursuing programs to develop weapons of mass destruction -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- I think the best intelligence estimates suggest that they have not been terribly successful. There's no question that they have some stockpiles of some of these sorts of weapons still under their control, but they have not been able to break out, they have not been able to come out with the capacity to deliver these kinds of systems or to actually have these kinds of systems that is much beyond where they were 10 years ago."

Condoleeza Rice, 29 July 2001:
"But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

(See http://tinyurl.com/ra1i for both these)

The CIA's best opinion was that Iraq had no WMD (or at best, very limitied capability for WMD). See http://tinyurl.com/r5tgo, for example.

So the question becomes: who, exactly, in the government thought that Iraq actually had WMDs, if not the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor nor the Intelligence service thought he even had a conventional army worth speaking about?

> In any case, whatever the reasons for the war, I think good came of it. We took out a corrupt regime headed by a guy who has used chemical weapons on his own people, invaded another nation to plunder its oil and coastline, and set fire to the oil wells when it turned out he couldn't have them. The world isn't safe having a guy like that in power. The greater mistake was not the second Gulf War, but that the first Gulf War didn't finish the job in the first place.

When the war started, I thought regime change was a valid reason, and thought Iraq would be better off once Hussein was gone. I agree that the First Gulf War should have been finished, and that the Middle East could have been a far better place, had it been.

Unfortunately, The current administration seems to have had little idea about what to replace the old regime with. The best evidence I can find of any sort of plan is this: http://tinyurl.com/58drn

As a direct result of the war, Iraq is now more dangerous for its citizens than it was before the war began. It is now a training ground for, and exporter of, anti-American terrorists, which it never was before.

I supported the Iraq War for the good it would do for the Iraqi people and the Middle East in general, despite the obvious fact that Iraq was in no serious way a military threat. I now feel like I was cheated, and if I could go back, I'd have been on the anti-war marches.

wintermute