We keep hearing that Iraq was a mistake, we shouldn’t have invaded, it was unjustified, it’s an illegal and immoral war, it’s Bush’s war, we should pull out and apologize for Bush’s “mistake”, etc. It just goes on and on from Bush critics on the Left and now in Congress, they are talking about pulling the financial rug out from under our troops before the mission is complete.

On September 6, 2004, John Kerry said:

This was far from an original quote by Kerry but he knew it would sound good to his liberal antiwar supporters. These words were originally from General Omar Bradley when on April 11, 1951 during the Korean War, Bradley was speaking to Congress against expanding the war to China when he said:

On October 13, 1960 during his presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy in discussing America’s role in Vietnam made the following statement:

Well Kennedy did become president but apparently forgot his campaign promise. He did expand our role in Vietnam and with continuing escalation of the war by Lyndon Johnson, led to the deaths of more than 50,000 American soldiers over a 10 year period because of combat and target limitations placed on our forces by the Johnson Administration and the Democrat Congress. Democrats must have thought this was good for America because now they want Iraq to be just like it. History does repeat itself, at least when Democrats are involved in war.

Vietnam could have easily been won in half the time without the interference from Washington Democrats. We could have bombed Hanoi out of existence. We could have bombed and destroyed the Viet Cong supply trails. We could have waged a war to win with overwhelming force but instead we engaged in a limited war so as not to offend the Communists. Even then, Democrats weren’t sure which side they were on.

Now Congress is trying to do the same thing all over again in Iraq with Democrats at the helm again. But this time it’s not enough that they just want to limit the war by opposing “the Surge”, they want to cut the funding to end it just like they did with Vietnam. It’s clear to most observers now which side Democrats are really on.

“It’s the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time - but it’s good that Saddam is gone.” It’s good that Saddam is gone but the war is wrong? Not one Democrat has stood up and suggested that Saddam should still be in power, yet they tell us the war was wrong. Their convoluted logic is confusing, not to mention self-contradictory. The only explanation for such incoherence is that the arguments they have constructed are blatantly hypocritical.

Some even suggest that Saddam should have been dealt with diplomatically, not with war. It’s most interesting how Democrats are able to forget and ignore history, even recent history. Was not 12 years of failed UN diplomacy enough? Did not President Bush ultimately ask Saddam and his sons to leave Iraq to avoid war? Were not all diplomatic efforts to avoid war exhausted before no other options remained on the table? Should diplomacy end only after America is attacked?

In 2002, Democrats agreed that Saddam must be removed. They also agreed, through the “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002” in Congress that the President should use all necessary force to accomplish that mission.

Now they ask: “But didn’t we have Saddam “contained” with weapons inspectors in the country?” Frankly no. It has become quite clear through audio tapes and captured documents after the invasion that Saddam was manipulating the inspectors and preventing them from inspecting and finding WMDs in addition to scamming the Food for Oil program while using and hiding the money for future WMD expansions. 

On behalf of the Iraq Survey Group after the invasion, David Kay reported to the 911 Commission:

"With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information -- including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities."

"There are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined."

"While searching for retained weapons, ISG teams have developed multiple sources that indicate that Iraq explored the possibility of CW production in recent years, possibly as late as 2003."

This, of course, was long after UN inspectors had left Iraq with little success of finding anything while Saddam was still in power.

With the help of France, Germany, and Russia in the UN, the inspectors would be out of Iraq shortly and sanctions would have been lifted leaving Saddam free to develop and redevelop his WMDs, which leads us to the question that nobody seems to be asking: where would we be today were Saddam still in power in Iraq?

By 2007, weapons inspectors would have been long gone from Iraq as would the sanctions. Our intelligence information though, would still be the same as it was in 2003. Saddam would still be a “grave and growing threat to American security and to the region”.  Even if Saddam's old stockpiles of WMD were all gone, he would have by now, reconstructed his WMD programs and weapons.

Americans would still be worried about when Saddam’s WMDs would arrive and detonate in American cities, whether they be directly from agents of Saddam or foreign terrorists supplied by Saddam. The inevitable would merely have been postponed to a time of Saddam’s choosing only the stakes would be higher.

The primary, no, the only argument against the invasion of Iraq is based on the contention that “no WMD were found in Iraq”. Of course this statement is false in the first place because in addition to other extensive evidence, over 500 canisters of chemical weapons materials were found in Iraq. To my knowledge that fact has never been reported by the mainstream media. It should have been the headline on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

But even without this, the statement ignores all of the other charges over a 12 year period against Saddam that justified the war including the shooting at our planes over the “no fly zone”, failure to comply with the 1991 ceasefire agreement, and refusal to comply with 17 UN resolutions to account for, and destroy, the WMD stockpiles. To this day, those WMDs are still unaccounted for. It’s interesting to note that Democrats never ask “where did they go?”. Shouldn’t we all want to know the answer to that?

There are two schools of thought on this question. Some say they didn’t exist and were all destroyed during the 1990s, but there is no evidence of that. The other is that they were transported out of the country to two locations in Syria and a third in the Bekka Valley of Lebanon, currently under the control of Hezbollah. There is ample evidence of this including testimony by Saddam's own Air Force General, Georges Sada.

To answer the question of where would we be today without the invasion of Iraq, we can toss out the later scenario however, because were it not for the pending invasion and delays in trying to get the UN to go along, those WMDs would not have been moved out of Iraq and would still be there, assuming that they did exist. They may have even been used in a war of Saddam’s choosing by now.

Considering the former scenario (WMDs didn’t exist before the invasion), how would we know that without actually being there? The fact is, we wouldn’t. We didn’t know that in 2003 and we wouldn’t know it today. Saddam never admitted to having destroyed them and he led the world to believe he still had them. That wouldn’t have changed. Iraq would still be considered a “grave and growing threat”, and concerns about Saddam’s WMDs would only have only grown larger since 2003.

In other words, without the invasion, Clinton, Kerry, Kennedy, and the rest of the Democrats would still be contending that Saddam has WMDs and has become a critical threat to American security. They would all be asking “Why hasn’t President Bush done anything about it”? We would still be right where we were in 2002 on the issue of Iraq.

The bottom line is that if you ignore all of the other justifications for the war, the matter of WMDs is not a deciding issue on the invasion of Iraq. If Democrats insist Iraq was the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, then they are also accepting the premise that Saddam would be in possession of WMD and we shouldn’t be worried about it.

It follows then that we shouldn’t be worried about No. Korea and Iran developing nuclear bombs, or that terrorists will eventually be here in our country killing our citizens and destroying our cities.

If Democrats are right about Iraq, then Americans have nothing to worry about from Islamic radicals who want nothing other than the destruction of Israel and America, and they can be dealt with through diplomacy and negotiations. If Republicans are right, then we have a lot to worry about, especially from Democrats in Congress and the prospect of having one of them in the White House in 2009.