Iraq...why shouldn't we have invaded?

Personally, I don't disagree with invading Iraq. I just question the timing and poor planning. You're totally right, Saddam DID have it coming. But why couldn't it have been held off for a year or more to gather support and do a bit of planning? Would a year have made that big of a difference? We still would have whooped Saddams military like nothing. Only we may have had a plan for what to do afterwards.

I am supposed to be doing an essay for English Lit.- using my moms computer- so have to make short and sweet-

Why aren't we going after the countries we know have WMD (Iran, N.Korea, Syria)? No oil there

Why don't we go after the countries where the terrorists were from (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon etc)? The Bush family has ties with the royal Saudi family plus oil.

We know that OBS is in Pakistan- why are we not there?

Saddam did get what was comming to him-but at what cost?

Look at the mess in Iraq now- on the brink of civil war, more home grown terrorist there, more pissed at us and what democracy?

What about all our servicemen and women who have lost their lives? And we are still over there- for how long?

These are just my thoughts on this.

We should not have invaded Iraq because...

1. Saddam Hussein was contained. He couldn't even fly planes over parts of his own country.

2. The evidence is overwhelming there were *no* WMDs. Individual weapons could be hidden, but the infrastructure to build them cannot be. All the so-called "evidence" of WMDs has now been proven false.

3. We were already engaged militarily elsewhere. You don't open a second front without an overwhelming good reason.

4. By invading Iraq, we inflamed the rage and tensions of millions of frustrated, desperate Arabs. More, we gave Extremists a propoganda victory.

5. We didn't have anything like a good plan for what to do *after* the invasion.

6. The invasion cost us moral credibility in the eyes of the world, including our allies. Next time we claim anything, we won't be believed.

7. Invading Iraq has cost and will cost billions of dollars at a time when our deficit is at record levels--and this in return for destablizing one of the most important regions in the world.

Short answer--we didn't get anything back near what we've paid, in blood and honor and treasure. Nowhere near.

i read yesterday that the president authorized a "saturation" of the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of Bin Ladin. Fine that he is doing so, but my point would be that if we were not already at a saturation point in search of Al Queda...why weren't we. I think it is because Iraq has overtaken the search for the terrorists that have declared war on us. If that's not enough reason to never have invaded Iraq, I can think of more, but that is enough in itself. However much I was against the war up to a couple years ago, I believe, as an American, that we must strive to leave Iraq in some semblance of order, because it will embolden our enemies if we leave...which brings me to another reason to never have gone...it puts us in a must win situation in a conflict with no guarantee of success...no matter how hard we try to win, we might fail.

You need to learn to keep up. The Senate Committee on prewar intelligence issued its report last week including this gem from the CIA:

October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "DID NOT HAVE A RELATIONSHIP, HARBOR, OR TURN A BLIND EYE TOWARD ZARQAWI AND HIS ASSOCIATES."

This is not new news. Bush supporters continue to spread lies (yes, they are lies when you keep repeating them after they have been proven false) and the little Bush-pups can’t seem to get enough of this garbage.

Chemical weapons? Chemically impossible as they have finite shelf lives and deteriorate over time. Hussein did not have the capacity to replenish his supply.

Are you talking about the trucks that Bush said where mobile chemical laboratories that turned out to be used to inflate weather balloons?

Why would you be afraid of a country that buries their planes in the sand? And, they didn’t even bury them all the way. I suspect it is hard to attack anyone when you jets are full of sand.

Pay attention – there were NO terrorists in Iraq before Bush invaded.

Hussein and OBL hated and distrusted each other.

***NEWS FLASH ***

Back to that Senate Intelligence report:

It concludes that:

FINDINGS DO NOT SUPPORT: … that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program,

FINDINGS DO NOT SUPPORT … that Iraq possessed biological weapons or EVER DEVELOPED mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.

Whoops – I guess Bush is no George Washington.

Zahir13 -

Thanks for reminding me.

Yes, Hussein lobbed a few pitiful missles as our planes (on orders from Bill Clinton) patrolled the no-fly zone. But, they never hit anything and, in fact, never came close to hitting anything.

During the last war, Iraq fired at least 3 missles towards our installations in Kuwait. Oh-No! So Scary!

Whoops, they missed the whole damned country. Two of the missles just kept on going until the ran out of fuel and crashed in the water, and the third missle pulled a U-turn and landed in Iraq (do you get points for shooting yourself?).

Good thing we jumped on Iraq before it hurt itself.

Royalrunner400

I thought it was $10,000, but so what. The amount and number of times he actually paid-out is irrelevant. Lots of countries pay suicide bombers, have for a long time, and our government never lifted a finger to stop it.

Listening to ex-patriot Iraqi's played a significant role in getting us into this mess.

I wasn't talking about any specific terrorist or group either. The fact is that Saddam Hussein was a secular alcohol-swilling cigar-smoking woman-chasing hedonist who didn't care what Mohammed said because he was a I'm gonna-have-my-fun-kinda-guy.

It is also a fact that radical Islamists hate I'm gonna-have-my-fun-kinda-guys (after all - that's one of the reasons put forth for their grievance against western culture).

The two could never be allies (certainly not for long).

I'm not sure I get the point about 2002/2003 documents. I know that around that time Bush was intimating a connection, but the CIA said it was something of a stretch to draw that conclusion.

And, far from even being neutral, it seems Hussein wanted to find and arrest Zarqawi - and I don't think he wanted to invite him over for drinks and a cigar.

Royalrunner400

I'm sure that from the moment Iraq fired a missle, we had a better idea of its course, trajectory, and likely impact than did the Iraqis. My only point was that Iraq was an obviously weak country and was no threat.

And, I'm glad your dad's base wasn't hit.

Did you know that the first American soldier killed upon our movement into Iraq from Kuwait (official war-time) was killed by an Iraqi civilian driving a pickup truck and shooting out the window, not by any soldier in the Iraqi army.

This civil resistence and unrest has been there from the beginning.

We invaded their country. They don't like it. I wouldn't either.

PS - Over the past year or so I have been to Walter Reed maybe a dozen times. And, maybe you know that side of war, but most Americans certainly don't. It is impossible to see the horrible damage done to these young (they are younger than my daughter) people and not be moved.

I remember passing a young couple (husband / wife or boyfriend / girlfriend I'm sure) in a hallway. The young girl / woman had tears streaming down her face. Her husband / boyfriend did not have a face - at all - you would not recognize him as human.

Maybe they were 20 years old - at the most.

I can't even guess at the number of teenage boys I saw who will spend the rest of their lives in wheelchairs (and yes, they are iincredibly brave and strong - and yes they still have a spirit for life, having family members and friends bring them beer and racing aound the base cutting off traffic in their wheelchairs).

Every American should spend some time at a Militiary Hospital. They have a right to know the cost of what their nation is trying to buy.

The democrats agreed on all of your points for invading Iraq. Until soldiers died and polls showed that many voters were against the war.

because Osama bin Laden is responsible for the 9-11 attacks and he roams free,, although Bush said on 9-12 that he would hunt him down,, dead or alive,,, in 2003 he pulled the CIA off the hunt for bin Laden,, reduced our troops in Afghanistan,, while bin Laden continues terrorist training camps on the Pakistan border,, the Taliban have a larger presence there than the US.....

al Zarqawi went to Iraq after Bush invaded,, Saddam did not attack Americans,,,,,,,,,,,,

The problem is not the invasion. The problem is we didn't use nukes to completely obliterate Iraq and anything left standing for 2000 miles around Iraq.

That whole region of the world is so psycho it is worthless.

SPIN IT DEMS, SPIN IT

On a side note, royal runner, you have to be one of the smartest people on here. you should answer more questions that the looney lefts ask, except it actually wouldn't matter cause they can't comprehend facts

Because a Democrat wasn't president! OBVIOUS!