The Washington Line

I guess it is not that surprising to have the Washington Post come out with the same Bush line about Saddam being such a big threat to the U.S.. Certainly he is a bad, bad guy - they don't come much worse. But the facts the Post digs up are all really old. Remember there were inspectors in their, and they were discovering the same thing we are discovering now - nothing. Saddam was well contained, and certainly could have been squeezed tighter.

Surely Gaddafi saw what happened to Saddam, but he had changed his tune long before the war. The question is, and one that is hardly being asked except by Dean, is the route we took the best one? There was such a rush to go into Iraq, let's not forget that. It was like we were racing to against the clock to stop Iraq from developing a bomb they were going to launch at us. But we knew they were not, we were just led to believe that. The big thing now is that the Saddam regime killed thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. But there was not any effort to find mass grave sites, to try to bring him in for crimes against humanity.

So the argument is that if Howard Dean were president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. But if we had not spent so much of our military efforts in Iraq, would we be on High Risk Alert from Al Queda terrorists this Christmas?

"But most Americans understand Saddam Hussein for what he was: a brutal dictator who stockpiled and used weapons of mass destruction, who plotted to seize oil supplies on which the United States depends, who hated the United States and once sought to assassinate a former president; whose continuing hold on power forced thousands of American troops to remain in the Persian Gulf region for a decade; who even in the months before his overthrow signed a deal to buy North Korean missiles he could have aimed at U.S. bases. The argument that this tyrant was not a danger to the United States is not just unfounded but ludicrous." Beyond the Mainstream (washingtonpost.com)