We're almost at the 5-year mark for this misbegotten war, and they're still making up the reason for being there in the first place:
Wurmser said that Cheney, Feith, and Bolton were convinced that U.S. containment of Saddam Hussein was failing and that the controls to keeping Saddam Hussein from expanding his regional influence were dying. As a result, the Iraqi leader was in position to exploit the rising anti-Americanism in the region and to break out from the sanctions strategy and the no-fly zones to lead a rogue coalition of nations to expel the United States from the region and even to wage war against the United States. The failure of the United Nations and multilateralism in general made a compelling case for U.S. intervention, according to Wurmser.
I don't even know if this is supposed to be taken seriously.
Saddam Hussein was going to build a coalition? With whom, the 3 2 1
0 countries he hadn't been at war with, or close to war with, in the
last 20 years? Wurmser seems to be an idiot, and the reference to
"rogue coalitions" is a hint: clearly, there was some
Syrian-Iraqi-Iranian superpower alliance that needed to be stopped
before it started. Just one thing: the combined GDP of these three
countries, today, is just over $1 trillion. That is less than 10% of US
GDP, and about what the US spends on all of its security and defense
obligations. Meaning that even if Saddam Hussein suddenly became a
master diplomat, managed to cobble together an alliance with two of his
rivals, and started a war against the United States, it would still be the shortest war ever. Hell, America would barely need to get off the couch. Canada might need to go to the gym for about 30 minutes before winning a war against these jokers.
Man, I miss the days when the excuses for the war were really outlandish, like "the new Iraq will be an Israel-friendly state" or "we're certainly not there for the oil, just don't ask which ministry we're guarding".
