[sweetjazz]

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I think this going to come down to semantics.

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Saddam had the potential for becoming a grave threat, but at the time of the invasion it was pretty clear that he was not a grave threat.

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I think Saddam still constituted a grave threat. We hadn't lifted the sanctions and still had the No-Fly Zone in effect. We now know he was trying to get these lifted and was bribing U.N. officials to do so. With a common enemy in the U.S., al Qaeda would be an attractive ally. This will come down to what we consider a "grave" threat and it sounds like that debate will be fruitless here.

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Perhaps the debate will come down to semantics, a judgment as to what constitutes grave. I agree with you that Saddam posed a threat to our interests at the time, and that we had tough times ahead in trying to maintain deterrance against Saddam as the international resolve to contain him was eroding and likely would have collapsed when it became clear that he did not have stockpiles of WMD. It would have been imperative that we maintained some way of monitoring his actions, so that he would not be successful in restarting a weapons program as he intended to do so.

I think DV has explained well the problems with assuming a Saddam and al Qaeda alliance, so I won't address that point further.

However, I think the threat of his restarting his weapons program -- which was real -- is not serious enough on its own to merit the costs of a major invasion. There is a huge difference between an intention to restart a weapons program and a developing nuclear program, for example. (By the way, the latter currently exist in some states that we would much rather they did not, as you well know.)

At the time, we could not be certain whether Saddam had stockpiled weapons and could restart a program quickly or whether his programs had been badly damaged and would need major work to be restarted. That is why the inspections could have been so valuable to us: they suggested at the point of invasion exactly what we ended up finding out later at a much greater cost, namely that Saddam's weapons programs had largely been decimated and he was unsuccessful in secretly stockpiling weapons, but he had attempted to preserve knowledge of the processes to restart a program later.

So I am not sure that debate has to be fruitless, even though we may never reach full agreement. I agree that Saddam posed a threat, even though I may not agree that he threatened us in all the ways you do (the possibility of a substantial alliance with al Qaeda seemed minimal to me then and still does now). I was open at the time to the possibility that war with Iraq might become a strategic necessity, and that Saddam's atrocities and failure to comply with international standards gave us justification for war. I just don't think that the conditions at the time made war the best option. I felt the same way at the time, though I was more open to the possibility that the president knew things that the media had not reported.