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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

That's what we tend to do in fact. We support whatever dictator is in power because it's better for business.

With Iraq we believed that they were still hoarding WMD's that they had from the 1980's. As we now know, that turned out to not be the case, and they actually did destroy them. Before the war, it was reported by most media outlets that WMD's were still in Iraq. Then you had the UN weapons inspectors who kept being thrown out of Iraq. If the weapons inspectors had been allowed to remain and do their job, there wouldn't have been a second Iraq war.

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Your narrative is broken. What actually happened was a bunch of ideologues came to power, saw an opportunity to remake the middle east in aid of a "new american century", then lied about wmds to convince the public there were WMDs.

The weapons inspectors were thrown out of Iraq because they were spying for the CIA. They were desperately invited back by Iraq to try and stop the war, to no avail, because WMDs were never the issue: war was.

And the House and Senate just went along.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Resolution

Of course, the major news agencies colluded to deceive the American public because they propagated the lie.

"With Iraq we believed that they were still hoarding WMD's that they had from the 1980's."

Nope. It was a straight up war of aggression. Bush and Blair outright lied.

You'd think that if they outright lied, many people would step forward to verify your claim. If not because it's the right thing to do, then for the money; book deals, etc. Especially in politics where they love to stick it to each other. CNN can run with the Hillary email server for days, and everyone will weigh in. Imagine what they could do with anyone who could verify that "Bush lied!"

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

'C' would be Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time.

> With Iraq we believed that they were still hoarding WMD's that they had from the 1980's

That doesn't explain the necessity of the attack. If he'd had WMDs he'd had them since the 1980s and it's not clear why it was important at that point to remove a capability that had not caused us trouble in twenty years.

Well, he was clearly fine with using WMD's.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_progra...

I suppose if someone has a weapon, isn't afraid to use it, and actually has used it and many occasions, you'd be a bit foolish to argue that point, "well, he hasn't used them in 20 years..."

> Well, he was clearly fine with using WMD's

And? He didn't use them against us. To do so would have been suicide. From a strategic perspective, why was it necessary to our interests in the world to remove him from power in Iraq - as it was not during the Gulf War?

"Then you had the UN weapons inspectors who kept being thrown out of Iraq."

One of the reasons Iraq didn't co-operate with weapons inspectors was because they were infiltrated by US and UK intelligence. As far as I know they were never actually "thrown out". The other big reason is that the weapons inspections was the only bargaining chip they had left.

"If the weapons inspectors had been allowed to remain and do their job, there wouldn't have been a second Iraq war."

That is not what happened. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/weapons-inspectors-leave-iraq/

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