[...] unstated) off the tables. The IAEA appears inept at preventing illegal nuclear proliferation. Sanctions did not deter the nuclear ambitions of Saddam; nor have they deterred North Korea or Iran- the other two nations in President Bush’s [...]

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Yeah Jugger, Let’s have not only have multiple islamofascists with nukes, but also add a national socialist with islamofascists allies and AQ training camps in his country “counter” the threat…..

Kind of like having a NS Germany “counter” a Communist USSSR. Poland did not fair too well there.

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after-all he was at extreme odds with islam and disliked the extremists

“extreme odds”? That is not at all entirely accurate; and the notion that a secular Saddam would not seek operational relationships with Islamic extremists is a myth.

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well,too bad, with a nuclear Pakistan sliding in to the hands of the islamofacists it all of sudden would have been good to have a nuclear buffer (Saddam) in the region, after-all he was at extreme odds with islam and disliked the extremists and warred with Iran for decades…so really if Bush doesnt stabilize Pakistan this could be another negative for his legacy.

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You’re proving my point. He could have made a bomb, and he wanted a bomb, and-as the intel before the war claimed-he’d have to get the special weapons grade matl from outside. DPRK comes to mind right off the bat.

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After all, he had managed to secretly build a bomb [...] all he needed [...] was [...] a special metal ball of highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

This is sort of like saying that I made an ice cream sundae, except without the ice cream. Purifying the fissile material is economically the hardest part of making a nuclear weapon (typically, thousands of centrifuges or other devices depending on the method chosen). I should also point out that U-235 and Pu-238 are different enough that you can’t just make a bomb that will accommodate a sphere of either material, so your statement can’t literally be true. But given that making the non-fissile parts of the bomb isn’t really the hardest part (though it is also quite difficult), this is a minor point.

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Ya know, if only I’d have included a para or two about the effects of a Ron Paul foreign policy=a nuclear Saddam…maybe they’d have come out of the woodwork. Oh well

;p

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I thought that we had decided that WMDs were really not that important to justify the invasion/occupation. It was enough to bring democracy and stability to Iran [Iraq] so that democracy could spread all over the mid east.

A good article written in February of 2003, on the reasons why Iraq, which was more than just about w(s)md:

AFTER IRAQ
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
The plan to remake the Middle East.
Issue of 2003-02-17 and 24
Posted 2003-02-10

Has a war ever been as elaborately justified in advance as the coming war with Iraq? Because this war is not being undertaken in direct response to a single shattering event (it’s been nearly a year and a half since the September 11th attacks), and because the possibility of military action against Saddam Hussein has been Washington’s main preoccupation for the better part of a year, the case for war has grown so large and variegated that its very multiplicity has become a part of the case against it. In his State of the Union address, President Bush offered at least four justifications, none of them overlapping: the cruelty of Saddam against his own people; his flouting of treaties and United Nations Security Council resolutions; the military threat that he poses to his neighbors; and his ties to terrorists in general and to Al Qaeda in particular. In addition, Bush hinted at the possibility that Saddam might attack the United States or enable someone else to do so. There are so many reasons for going to war floating around—at least some of which, taken alone, either are nothing new or do not seem to point to Iraq specifically as the obvious place to wage it—that those inclined to suspect the motives of the Administration have plenty of material with which to argue that it is being disingenuous. So, along with all the stated reasons, there is a brisk secondary traffic in “real” reasons, which are similarly numerous and do not overlap: the country is going to war because of a desire to control Iraqi oil, or to help Israel, or to avenge Saddam’s 1993 assassination attempt on President George H. W. Bush.
Yet another argument for war, which has emerged during the last few months, is that removing Saddam could help bring about a wholesale change for the better in the political, cultural, and economic climate of the Arab Middle East. To give one of many possible examples, Fouad Ajami, an expert on the Arab world who is highly respected inside the Bush Administration, proposes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that the United States might lead “a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies have been on cruel display.” The Administration’s main public proponent of this view is Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who often speaks about the possibility that war in Iraq could help bring democracy to the Arab Middle East. President Bush appeared to be making the same point in the State of the Union address when he remarked that “all people have a right to choose their own government, and determine their own destiny—and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom.”
Even those suffering from justification fatigue ought to pay special attention to this one, because it goes beyond the category of reasons offered in support of a course of action that has already been decided upon and set in motion. Unlike the other justifications, it is both a reason for war and a plan for the future. It also cries out for elaboration. Democracy is a wonderful idea, but none of the countries in the Middle East, except Israel and Turkey, resemble anything that would look like a democracy to Americans. Some Middle Eastern countries are now and have always been ruled by monarchs. Some are under the control of an ethnic or religious group that represents a minority of the population. Saudi Arabia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan are the world’s only major nations named after a single family, and in Saudi Arabia the royal family functions as, in effect, the country’s owner. Most Middle Eastern countries don’t even make the pretense of having freely elected parliaments; in Iran, for example, candidates have to be approved by the mullahs. And the very problem that democracy in the Middle East is meant to solve—rising Islamic radicalism, encouraged or tolerated by governments that see it as a way to propitiate their increasingly poorer and younger populations—makes the prospect of elections dangerous, because anti-American Islamists might win.
People in the Administration are quick to explain that, where the Middle East is concerned, they don’t mean immediate, American-style electoral democracy but, rather, a deliberate building of “civil society” or “democratic institutions,” like a free press, political parties, open markets, and a system of written laws and courts that administer them, with national parliamentary elections as the final, and somewhat distant, step. That seems a worthwhile project, but if it takes place in the aftermath of a war it should be understood as involving the making of choices and the use of power by the United States, rather than merely polite encouragement. In search of a plausible scenario for the postwar future of the Middle East, I recently spoke with two Pentagon officials who have a reputation as leading hawks in the Administration: Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, which is the job that Wolfowitz held in the first Bush Administration; and Stephen Cambone, who entered this Administration as Feith’s deputy, and is now in charge of evaluating weapons systems and other Pentagon programs.

Stephen Cambone, who has an E Ring office that is somewhat smaller than Feith’s, is big and athletic-looking, and he speaks more guardedly than Feith does—almost in code, rather than in Feith’s full, elegant sentences. When I asked him how an American victory in Iraq might affect other Middle Eastern countries, he said, “The leadership in the countries in that region is changing. You’ve seen changes in Syria, you’ve seen them in Jordan; there will, over some period of time, be changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and other places. The Palestinians. The way in which Iraq affects the calculations of those governments and their populations.” How does Iraq affect their calculations? He mentioned the “transshipment of oil, and illicit flows, and trade coming in that you try to avoid sanctions against,” which produce an “undercutting, or undermining, of what would otherwise be the standard and ordinary relationships among states which would otherwise have their relationship based on mutual interest.” He added, “Because Iraq is not a normal state, it is dysfunctional with respect to the politics of the region, and that, in turn, has profound effects on the internal politics of the individual states.” Cambone seemed to be referring specifically to the relationship between Syria and Iraq: the Iraqis provide oil to the Syrians, supposedly well in excess of the quantities permitted under United Nations sanctions, and get Syrian money and support in return. Jordan is also dependent on Iraqi oil, which means that its government has to tolerate Saddam’s political wooing of the country’s Palestinian majority. If Iraqi oil came with different ideological strings attached, these governments might feel freer to resist Islamic radicalism openly.
Will there be further regime changes in the Middle East? “Things won’t be the same after as they were before,” Cambone said. “Just by virtue of the event occurring, people making commitments. So should a conflict, and I underline should, if, maybe— There is a prospect that things, yeah, I think things could change in many of those places. Now, things could also go badly. One should not discount, for all that one can imagine good things happening, the prospect that things that would not be helpful or positive could occur, too”—especially, he added, if the United States and its allies do not manage the postwar period adeptly. Is the hope of effecting secondary changes part of the motivation for war? Cambone thought for a long moment. “Hmm. I don’t know how to answer that.” He stopped again, and finally, deliberately, said, “There is no lack of reflection on what the consequences either of the regime persisting or of its being gone might be. That is all part and parcel of how one thinks through the problem.”

A few things should be said about this vision of the near-term future in the Middle East. It is breathtakingly ambitious and optimistic. It might plausibly be described as a spreading of democracy but, perhaps more important, it would also involve, as the “Clean Break” paper said, forcefully altering the regional balance of power. And it differs greatly from the vision of the future of the Middle East that will prevail among liberals, both here and abroad, after the war in Iraq. It treats Pan-Arab nationalism as illegitimate. It does not accept the widespread assumption that no regional good can follow the fall of Saddam unless peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority begin immediately. And it sees the fall of Saddam Hussein less as the end of a great diplomatic and military effort than as a step in an ongoing process.
The chances that President Bush has read David Wurmser’s book must be pretty close to zero. But in the State of the Union address Bush rhetorically made some room for the United States to pursue an aggressive post-Iraq-war agenda in the Middle East. Washington was, understandably, so focussed on how Bush would “make the case” for war with Iraq that the State of the Union’s foreign-policy doctrinal material, which preceded Bush’s discussion of Saddam Hussein, got almost no attention. The news about that section of the speech is that Bush defined the United States’ mission more broadly than he ever has before. This mission, he said, is not just protecting the country from terrorist attacks, and not just ridding the world of “every terrorist group of global reach” (the previous formulation, which he unveiled in his speech on September 20, 2001), but “confronting and defeating the man-made evil of international terrorism.” By dropping the qualifying clause “of global reach,” he gave the United States enough doctrinal space to declare war, if it wishes, on purely regional overseas terrorist organizations, like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs. Bush made it clear that he considers killing terrorists to be well within the United States’ charter, and that the support of allies is not a necessary precondition of American military action overseas. States “that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons”—a category that clearly includes Iran and (if you take out nuclear weapons) Syria—have sacrificed their right to sovereignty. It is the United States’ duty and its responsibility not just to protect itself but also to spread liberty, which is “God’s gift to humanity,” to every nation, to bring about “the end of terrible threats to the civilized world,” and to be the guarantor of “the hopes of all mankind.”
What these phrases will mean for the Middle East, precisely, is hard to say, because war leads to so many unpredictable consequences. But what they will mean in Washington couldn’t be clearer. After the war in Iraq has ended, the war between the hawks and the doves will continue.

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I hesitate to fault the Bush Administration for not highlighting the myriad of other reasons, such as the nuclear conflict you cite above, as part of our justification for the war to remove Saddam and liberate Iraq.

I realize that they were saying some of these things, but that the media constantly focused on the Saddam-WMD linkage which turns out to be weaker than expected.

As we’re realizing now in Iraq there are a host of benefits to a succesful strategy to liberate Iraq and they tie directly into our overall strategy to WIN the war on terror.

We went into Iraq to remove Hussein. But by so doing, Al Queda made Iraq their line in the sand where the infidel (us) would be defeated.

If the surge in Iraq continues to succeed it will be abundantly clear throughout the Muslim world that Al Queda was defeated utterly, by the United States, but more importantly BY OTHER MUSLIMS like the Sunnis and non-extremist Shia.

In fact, Islamic extremism of both Shia and Sunni stripes will be seen to be defeated as extremists in the Mahdi Army are also being arrested or killed.

It’s no wonder then that polls of Muslims worldwide show a drop in support for the concept of a violent jihad.

If these trends continue, Iraq will be seen as the “keystone” in the Bush geostrategy which is a justification for invading Iraq that transcends all talk about WMDs.

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No john. There’s a multitude of casus belli. Wars are not football games or bar room brawls with one issue at the core. They start because of a pile of issues. WMD, ties to AQ, democracy, battlefield of our preference not AQ’s, and many MANY more.

as to the fissile material, imagine a bomb sans such material in the hands of Saddam (who had already specifically said he’d use WMD on the US regardless of consequences-nice transcript of a tape in the ISG report of this btw). Do you trust that he’d go against his word, or trust his word, his history, and his nature?

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