[speeder]

"Facts are inconvenient things"........

The fact of the matter is that at the time when Bush, (not Saddam), kicked the inspectors out and invaded Iraq, Saddam was 100% contained as a threat. That would have been true even if he was a threat to the rest of the world at that time, which he wasn't. This was not a known fact at the time, but it was being determined in a manner that was not costing lives or billions of dollars, or running up the biggest deficits in history and devaluing the dollar to the point where it is destabilising the entire world's economy.

What Bush and Co. did do was to transform a peaceful country, (albeit one that was run by an iron-fisted dictator), into the most violent place in the world, and give middle eastern terrorism its biggest boost since (?) Iraq sits smack in the middle of the most jihad-ridden/religious extremist/f'ed up part of the world, and it was actually a stabilising influence, in a strange way, because S. Hussein was a secular leader, not religious or a practicing Muslim by any stretch, and certainly not admired or liked by Bin Laden, or vice-versa.

Many facts were known at the time of the run-up to the war, and many more are known now. What blows my mind, and really shatters my hope, is that so many people still can't seem to grasp what a monumental blunder this war was/is today! And not only was a lot of what's happening predictable, it was predicted!

The world is well-stocked w/ experts on this region of the world, the great majority of whom advised against invading Iraq and predicted quite accurately the problems that we would encounter, but Bush chose to listen only to a relatively small group of poli scientists known as the Neocons, (since completely discredited and widely doubted before the war), and Iraqi exiles w/ huge vested interest in convincing him to topple Saddam Hussein.

The number of other politicians who either believed Bush and Cheney or didn't have the balls to cross them, (9/11, remember?), is completely irrelevent. They flat-out lied when they stated things as facts or with certainty regarding Iraq as a threat when in fact they did not know themselves and were taking what they thought would be a winning gamble.