He Keeps Trying, He Keeps Failing

A couple, three days ago, I pointed out how McIlheran misses the mark with a post on whether the surge worked. I simply highlighted how it should be irrelevant, because we shouldn't have been in Iraq in the first place.

Later that same day, McIlheran puts up a long, winding post in an effort to justify that we needed to be in Iraq because Saddam was such a bad man. Now, old Paddy is absolutely correct in asserting that Saddam was a bad man. He was responsible for the murder of thousands and thousands of people.

What Paddy doesn't tell us is that Saddam's evil nature was not why Bush chose to invade Iraq. In fact, that did not become the reason until long after the invasion and the capture of Saddam.

The original reason was that he had nuclear weapons. When that was proven to be a lie, it was weapons of mass destruction. Oops, another lie. After trying a few more on for size before discarding them, the Bush administration, and his backers, like McIlheran and Sykes, settled for the bad man line.

Another thing that McIlheran willfully fails to mention is the fact that Saddam was able to gain his power and the WMDs that he did once have. Reagan and his cronies gave them to him in the 80's, when Reagan was using Saddam to go after Iran. You might even recognize one of the guys that gave him the WMDs before deciding it maybe wasn't such a good idea after all: